Sorry datahogg I wasn't trying to contradict you I was supporting your observation that these scenario's create very skewed distributions.
When it comes to something simple like coin flips, or anything were probabilities and payouts are fixed, it's often not hard to get actual results from closed form calculations rather than simulations. For example since 1/(0.5^20) = 1,048,576 we can say that if you flip a coin 20 times in a row, you have an approximate 1 in Million chance of getting 20 heads and also a 1 in Million chance of 20 tails.
The big limitation of this is that these calcs are all based upon final outcomes and do not consider path dependency which can be important. For example assume you start with $10k, lose 10% of your money 7 trades in a row and then make 10% of money in the next 8 trades. Simple calcs (0.9^7*1.1^*8) will tell you that you end up with $10253 a winning scenario. In reality at the end of the 7th trade your down to $4782 in equity, and hence if you need $5000 in margin to place the 8th trade you can't make the trade, you are 'ruined' and your final outcome is $4782 and not $10253.
If you flip a coin 50 times, you win 50% on a head, but lose 50% on a tail, and you consider yourself ruined when you lose 90% of your starting pot, then I believe almost 90% of sims/scenarios will end in you being ruined. Just under 7% will finish with less than they started but not be ruined (average 32.6% of starting pot). Finally the 3% of people who finish with more than they started with, finish with a pot on average almost 3000% of what they started with. This is heavily skewed by the top 0.00015% (1 in 6538) who average a return over 300,000%.
It's actually quite easy to convert these numbers based upon how much you want to risk. In the same 50/50 game with +50/-50 payouts, if you risk 6% of your pot, then this is the same as a 50/50 game with payout +3/-3 where you bet everything. No nobody is ruined, because even if you lose 50 times in a row you still have 21% of your initial pot (0.97^50). This is based upon betting 6% of your CURRENT pot at each bet. If you bet 6% of your INITIAL pot at each bet, the numbers are very different as obviously you can only lose 16 times more than you win before you are ruined