Skip to main content

Should Your Risk Tolerance Change with Your Level of Wealth?

Basically, accumulated wealth should have nothing to do with your risk tolerance, or risk management. There are two ways to look at this:
  • Your risk tolerance should decrease as you get older, because you have fewer years until retirement to ride out any bad markets or bad decisions. If you’re in your 20s, you probably should be investing in mostly stocks, which over the long-term have better returns, though from time-to-time bonds can offer very good returns. If you’re in your 60s, you should be in “safer” asset classes, such as bonds and money markets. I’m 67 and I have 25 percent in stocks, 10 percent in bonds (I believe bonds are in a bubble and the face value will go down in the next few years), and the rest in money markets. I’m kind of waiting to see what the market does, as it seems to not have much direction right now. (The S&P 500 is essentially unchanged over the last 12 months. Below is a chart of the SPY ETF, which tracks the index. Each candle is 1 week.)
  • Your risk management plan should never change. One thing a lot of novice investors do not do is have a risk management plan before they make a purchase. My rules are that I never risk more than 1% of my portfolio on any one investment. This doesn’t mean I spread my investments out over 100 investments. For example, if I’m thinking of buying XYZ stock (or an ETF) at $50 a share, and 1% percent of my portfolio is $1,000, I will calculate my position size based on this, as well as a stop-loss to automate the process. If I believe I need to have a stop-loss at $45 to allow the stock room to wiggle (as I call it), then my initial position size will be 1000 / 5 = 200 shares. In other words, if the stock goes down by $5, my maximum loss will be $1,000. I never hold onto a stock with a dream and hope. I can always re-evaluate and re-invest. If the stock starts to go up in price I could add to my position as appropriate, as well as raising the stop. Successful investors always do the math before making an investment. So, always do the math,

Note: I do this technical analysis after I’ve examined fundamentals. The health of the economy and the health of the company.x



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for the comment. Will get back to you as soon as convenient, if necessary.

Popular posts from this blog

California: A Model for the Rest of the Country, Part 2

Part 1 here . On Leaving the Golden State Guest Post by NicklethroweR . Posted on the Burning Platform. The fabled Ventura Highway is all that separates my artist loft from the beach where surfing first came to the United States. Both my balcony and front patio face the freeway at about eye level and I could easily smack a tennis ball right on to the ever busy 101. Access to the beach and boardwalk is very important to a Tourist Town such as mine and I can see one underpass from my balcony and another underpass from the patio. Further up the street are two pedestrian bridges. Both have been recently remodeled so that people can not use it to kill themselves by leaping down into traffic. The traffic, just like the spice, must flow and the elites that live here do not like to be inconvenienced as they dart about between Malibu and Santa Barbara. Another feature of living where I live would have to be the homeless, the insane and the drug addicts that wander this particular...
Post a Comment
Read more

Factfulness: Ignorance about global trends. The world is actually getting better.

This newsletter was powered by  Thinkr , a smart reading app for the busy-but-curious. For full access to hundreds of titles — including audio — go premium and download the app today. From the layman to the elite, there is widespread ignorance about global trends. Author and international health professor, Hans Rosling, calls Factfulness  “his very last battle in [his] lifelong mission to fight devastating global ignorance.” After years of trying to convince the world that all development indicators point to vast improvements on a global scale, Rosling digs deeper to explore why people systematically have a negative view of where humanity is heading. He identifies a number of deeply human tendencies that predispose us to believe the worst. For every instinct that he names, he offers some rules of thumb for replacing this overdramatic worldview with a “factful” one. In 2017, 20,000 people across fourteen countries were given a multiple-choice quiz to assess basic global literac...
Post a Comment
Read more

Proper way to calculate CAGR using T-Sql for SQL Server

After reading (and attempting the solutions offered in some) several articles about SQL and CAGR,  I have reached the conclusion that none of them would stand testing in a real-world environment. For one thing, the SQL queries offered as examples are overly complex or don't use the correct math for calculating proper CAGR. Since most DBAs don't have an MBA or Finance degree, let me help.  The correct equation for calculating Compound Annual Growth Rate (as a percentage) is:  Some key points about CAGR:  The compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) is one of the most accurate ways to calculate and determine returns for anything that can rise or fall in value over time. Investors can compare the CAGR of two alternatives to evaluate how well one stock performed against other stocks in a peer group or a market index. The CAGR does not reflect investment risk. You can read a full article about CAGR  here .  To calculate the CAGR for an investment in a language like ...
Post a Comment
Read more