Risk and Return
The art of "investing" is defined by risk and return. An investor is willing to assume a certain amount of risk as a trade-off to getting paid an expected return. It is quite important for any person, prior to jumping into the stock market, to understand the different types of risk and how to measure them. As we will see, some types can be circumvented through diversification, while others cannot. Be sure you are getting paid for the added risk you take!
When an investor buys a security (stock, bond, mutual fund, artwork, etc) they have a certain "expected return." Some investors may quantify this number as a percentage, while others just hope for some sort of positive return. Expected return is mathematically defined as income + capital appreciation. Certain stocks, generally in the technology sector, do not pay any income (dividends) because they reinvest all profits in their business. In the case of these (growth) stocks, your expected return is strictly capital appreciation. Keep in mind that investing is a two-way street between the investor and the company you are investing in. If you buy a stock position in a company (or a bond from them) they have to give you an adequate reward for doing so or you'll invest elsewhere. Thus, the "required return" is what will induce an investor to invest in an asset, given that asset's level of risk. There are a few types of risk:
systematic risk- this is risk which cannot be diversified. When you buy a security it is subject to the following unpredictable factors which may affect (either positively or negatively) your return on investment: interest rate risk, reinvestment rate risk, market risk, exchange rate risk, and purchasing power (inflation) risk. There is nothing you can do to protect an individual stock from an inflationary period. Please note that even though you cannot prevent these risks, there are still ways to hedge them. An example would be buying a floating rate mortgage security to protect a stock which may tend to perform negatively in a rising interest-rate environment.
unsystematic risk- this component of risk can be diversified by having a "portfolio" of securities. Diversifiable risks include business risk, financial risk, and country risk. For example, if you have $10,000 and buy a homebuilding stock with it, you are not diversifying your risks. If the overall stock market goes up, but the housing sector slows down, your stock will underperform the overall market. Many investment professionals believe that owning a basket of roughly 10-15 stocks in different sectors can eliminate most of the unsystematic risk.
The most important measure of a security's risk is its standard deviation. This is a statistical measure of the historical volatility of a portfolio of securities, usually figured with a 5, or 10-year return. In simpler terms, standard deviation is a measure of how much investment returns tend to fluctuate around their average. To compute standard deviation, you need to write down the % return each year for a specific stock or mutual fund. You then add them all up and divide by the number of securities you are using. This will give you the "mean" or average return of the portfolio over a period of time. You subtract the mean from each annual return and then square it. You add up all these squared numbers, divide by the number of years, and take the square root. This will give you the "standard deviation." A portfolio will move within 1 standard deviation (whatever the number is) 68% of the time. It will move within 2 standard deviations 98% of the time. This is an important way to assess potential risk and return from a portfolio of securities. Check out this profile page from yahoo.com which goes into the statistical measure of “risk.” http://finance.yahoo.com/q/rk?s=HRTVX
Please e-mail me for further discussion on how to quantify and understand risk.
Russell Bailyn
Premier Financial Advisors
(212) 752-4343 *31
rbailyn@gmail.com
