Am continuing to really enjoy using RiskAMP! One of my simulations is a large financial sprdsht. In the advanced properties I have chosen the dispaly option to return the mean values at the end of the simulation. the formulaes are then all calculated the last time using that mean value that shows up in the simulation fctn cell. Why does this not match the "simulationpercentile" of 50%? I am using a normal distribution. Brian

Thanks for the nice words. Basically, even a normal distribution that looks symmetrical will have a slight bias one way or the other - just an artifact of random sampling (if you had an infinite number of iterations, it would disappear - but for any finite number there will be some skew). So the 50th percentile might be slightly higher or lower than the mean. You can see the bias using the SimulationSkewness function - it will be small, but not zero.

Try comparing it to the simulation mean (or if you're really worried about it, I can tell you how to pull out all the sample values and use Excel to calculate averages and percentiles).

Alex Edwards
alex@riskamp.com

Thank you again. You have explained what I was wondering about. Brian