The estimators correspond to $(\mu,\sigma,\nu)$, the parameters of a Student-$t$ distribution with location parameter $\mu\in{\mathbb R}$, scale parameter $\sigma>0$ and $\nu>0$ degrees of freedom. This density is simply given by $$f(x;\mu,\sigma,\nu)=\dfrac{1}{\sigma}\dfrac{\Gamma \left(\frac{\nu+1}{2} \right)} {\sqrt{\nu\pi}\,\Gamma \left(\frac{\nu}{2} \right)} \left(1+\dfrac{(x-\mu)^2}{\nu \sigma^2} \right)^{-\frac{\nu+1}{2}}.$$ There seems to be no closed expression for these estimators. The warnings in this case are harmless. You can check this by finding the MLE using the command optim as follows # log-likelihood function loglik <-function(par){ if(par[2]>0 & par[3]>0) return(-sum(log(dt((alvsloss-par[1])/par[2],df=par[3])/par[2]))) else return(Inf) } # optimisation step optim(c(0,0.1,2.5),loglik) The following code shows how to plot the fitted density together with a kernel density estimator. # fitted density param = optim(c(0,0.01,2.5),loglik)$par fit.den <- function(x) dt((x-param[1])/param[2],df=param[3])/param[2] curve(fit.den,-0.15,0.15) points(density(alvsloss),type="l",col="red")