
He decides to find the average price of Apple’s share price for the past five months. However, to ensure that this investment will bring him a substantial return, he has decided to check how the stock performed in the past. He knows that the company has strong financials. Jim wants to find a stock for investment. Thus, the geometric average provides a more accurate calculation of an average return. The geometric mean includes the volatility and compounding effects of returns. Geometric mean is an nth root of the product of all numbers in a collection. In finance, the arithmetic mean may be misleading in the calculations of returns, as it does not consider the effects of volatility and compounding, producing an inflated value for the central point of the distribution. Here are the two most popular ones:Īrithmetic mean is the total of the sum of all values in a collection of numbers divided by the number of numbers in a collection. There are multiple ways to calculate the mean. There are different ways of measuring the central tendency of a set of values. Learn more about other mathematical concepts with CFI’s Math for Corporate Finance Course.

The concept is used in various financial fields, including but not limited to portfolio management and business valuation. It is a statistical concept that carries a major significance in finance. It is also referred to as an expected value. In statistics, it is a measure of central tendency of a probability distribution along median and mode. The mean is the average or the most common value in a collection of numbers. Mean is an essential concept in mathematics and statistics.
