Kurtosis is a measure that allows us to obtain information about the tails of a distribution with respect to its overall shape. Distribution tails mostly occur as a result of rare events.

Such events are not observed frequently but can have important consequences if underestimated. When selling property insurance, for example, an insurer would be primarily interested in the distribution tails.

Other related topics you might be interested to explore are Skewness, Quintiles, Mean, Median, and Mode.

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Kurtosis is among the topics included in the Quantitative Methods module of the CFA Level 1 Curriculum.