Morphology of asset asymmetry

Abstract Although many financial paradigms are predicted on the assumption that security returns are symmetrically distributed, relatively little research has been conducted into the legitimacy of the presumption. This effort is intended to present the results of a thorough investigation of the subject, where two measures of skewness have been computed and compared. Roughly, the major conclusion is that regardless of how skewness is measured, securities have displayed a persistent propensity to positive asymmetry during the last three decades, although the evidence is less unambiguous when evaluated over the last 50 years.