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StatisticsNormal Distribution
By Sitraka Forler · Lecturer, Durham Business SchoolUpdated 13 September 2026 About this site
Bell-shaped probability distribution defined by mean and std dev.
Financial returns are often modelled as normally distributed (though in reality they have fat tails). The normal distribution underlies Black-Scholes option pricing and many risk models.
Example
import numpy as np np.random.normal(loc=0.001, scale=0.015, size=252)