Understanding Investment Risk
If investment is so easy, why isn’t everybody rich? Investment involves risk by definition. You invest an amount of money and hope that it earns an extra amount for you, but we must be aware of the risk. Risk is defined by the amount of money you would potentially lose in the worst situation. This is the factor R we see in return to risk ratio. This is a intuitive method to estimate the quality of an investment and chances are you already know how to use it in your daily life.
When you are given two choices, how would you come up with your decision? For example, there are two different methods for you to go home, one is to go on the high way, and another one is to go through the street. If you choose the high way, you may be able to get home within 30 minutes if everything is smooth. But there is a possibility that there is a traffic accident and you would need two more hours to get home. Choice number two is to try the streets with fewer cars. There are many traffic lights and whatever the traffic is, you would need 45 minutes to get home.
You may consider the benefit of getting home quicker and the risk of being trapped in traffic accidents to come up with your final decision. The same thinking process can be used in investment. We consider the potential return and the possible loss and see if the ratio between the two is meaningful.
The best investors use this return to risk ratio to assess their investment opportunities. A seasoned professional investor would always start an investment consideration with the possible amount of money he could lose in a particular investment. And we denote the amount by R. Let say the expected return is 3 times of the risk you bear, we say this is a 3R opportunity. Whether we are talking about stock, mutual fund, property or any other investment vehicle, we use this same system to categorize them. The assets are just the tools. What we concern is the money. So a 2R in stock market is in substance the same as a 2R in the property market. They all mean an opportunity to earn twice the amount of money you may lose. The below example would make it clear.
Assume the property market is going up. You notice the chance and are buying a house and selling it immediately to monetize the opportunity. The price of the house is $80,000 and you got a leverage to do the acquisition. The amount you must pay is $5,000. If you couldn’t sell the house promptly, you would lose the whole amount of $5,000. Hence, the risk factor R is $5,000. The price you aim to make a profit of $20,000 and sell the house is $100,000. Therefore, this is a 4R investment opportunity because the expected return is 4 times the amount of money you could possibly lose.
If the property market turn out milder than you predicted and you sold the house with USD90 000, you get USD10 000 profit. It would become a 2R investment, i.e. the return you get is 2 times the risk you bear.
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