Values greater than 1.00 indicate positive skewness; values less than 1.00 indicate negative skewness. While closely correlated with the traditional statistical measure of skewness (viz., the third moment of a distribution), the authors of PMPT argue that their volatility skewness measure has the advantage of being intuitively more understandable to non-statisticians who are the primary practical users of these tools. The importance of skewness lies in the fact that the more non-normal (i.e., skewed) a return series is, the more its true risk will be distorted by traditional MPT measures such as the Sharpe ratio. Thus, with the recent advent of hedging and derivative strategies, which are asymmetrical by design, MPT measures are essentially useless, while PMPT is able to capture significantly more of the true information contained in the returns under consideration. Many of the common market indices and the returns of stock and bond mutual funds cannot themselves always be assumed to be accurately represented by the normal distribution. Data: Monthly returns, January, 1991 through December, 1996. For a comprehensive survey of the early literature, see R. Libby and P.C. Fishburn [1977].