I’m clueless about a lot of things but the number one thing on my mind lately has been risk in investing. I don’t mean stock market investing or real estate investing, I meant the concept of investing and risk (specifically, determining and being paid for taking risk).

Most people associate investing with the stock market because that’s the easiest way to invest. The stock market is the perfect investment system in that your assets are pretty liquid and the barriers to entry are low. It’s absolutely free to open a brokerage account and trades are dirt cheap (cheapest is $0 a trade at Zecco, but that has gotten mixed reviews; second cheapest reputable brokerage is TradeKing). You can buy and sell stocks pretty easily as there is never a scramble to find interested parties, though the price you get may not be to your liking. You hope for good equity appreciation (increase in stock price) and perhaps take some cash flow along the way (dividends). The rate of return on the S&P has been around 10% for the last 80+ years.

Now take the second thing people associate with investing – real estate. In real estate, the assets aren’t as liquid (especially now!) and the barriers to entry are much higher. At best you have to come up with a downpayment and transaction costs (Realtor fees, lender fees) are high, fewer people get involved in real estate investing. (Over the next two weeks I’ll have four guest posts going over real estate written by Trisha Allen, a seasoned real estate investor, so if this is up your alley keep your ear to the grindstone) With real estate, again you hope for good equity appreciation (increase in home value) and perhaps some cash flow (rent) along the way. The rate of return on this has generally been about inflation (surprisingly) according to some experts (they could be wrong).

There are other means of investing (such as owning your own Rita’s Italian Ice!) but the gist is to put your hard earned money to work for you. However, how do you analyze risk?

Every risk analysis class I’ve taken, be in undergrad or for the MBA, has always explained the same thing. You take the severity of a bad event times the probability and that’s your risk. They never talk about how to guesstimate the severity or the probability, just that you multiply and some magic number comes out. Also, they never talk about how much of a payoff you should get for shouldering how much risk. Real estate seems riskier to me than the stock market (higher barriers, more money involved, more headache), yet the stock market has greater returns. One expects riskier investments to yield greater returns.

Anyway, that’s what I’m clueless about, how about you?

(Photo by Patrick Haney)

It’s always fun to see discount broker rankings. Last week, I wrote about a little preview to the SmartMoney 2008 Broker Survey in which SmartMoney released some preliminary results from their annual ranking of brokerage firms. SmartMoney has published the full details of their report and I’m sad to say that TradeKing did not retain the top spot they enjoyed the last two years (third place isn’t bad!).

(Click to continue reading…)

If you know nothing about the stock market, consider yourself lucky.

If you think the stock market is a scary place that you don’t understand, you’re actually in good shape.

I learned about the stock market in a time of prosperity, in pieces, and probably in the worst possible way and it’s burned me on numerous occasions. When everything is going up and there’s an irrational exuberance, you are afforded the opportunity to have good results come out of bad decisions and that can lead to the development of bad habits. So, if you know nothing about the stock market and are scared of it, that’s actually the best time to start learning about it.

So, if you’re scared and I have bad habits, why should you read anything I have to say about investing? I don’t actually talk much about investing outside of discussing ideas and theories (and recommending index funds from Vanguard) but today I’ll outline a few good resources I’ve found to help you learn more about investing in the stock market.

Morningstar Investing Classroom

Morningstar is great. The number one best place to start, if you know absolutely nothing, is with Morningstar’s Investing Classroom. They have four areas of beginner study – Stocks, Funds, Portfolio and Bonds. Each classroom has five levels of study with the exception of Bonds, it only has two, and each level has anywhere from five to eleven courses. I’ve taken several of the courses and they begin with the basics and move onto progressively more advanced topics.

As a bonus, you earn points for answering the quizzes following each course and can redeem those points for various rewards (you have to be a free registered member to earn these credits).

Motley Fool’s Investing Basics

If you’ve completed all of Morningstar’s Investing Classroom courses, Motley Fool’s Investing Basics is a great place to reinforce those ideas but with a witty and humorous twist. Depending on how quickly you went through the Morningstar site, you probably glossed over a few topics or forgotten others, so review can’t hurt. Plus they’re entertaining to read.

Decisions Decisions Decisions…

At this point, armed with the basics, you have to make a decision. Do you want to invest the your stock allocation in index/mutual funds or do you want to try to go your own way and invest in individual stocks? If the answer is index and mutual funds, you probably are armed with enough information go forth and conquer. Open an account with a Vanguard or a Fidelity and have it (those two always seem to dominate Top Fund lists). If you want to go after individual stocks… there is more learning ahead. (some would say there is more to learn but from here but between Morningstar and Fool, you have enough information to Google search from here)

Securities and Exchange Commission

The SEC has a great guide to financial statements, which you’re going to have to decipher and interpret if you hope to be able to pick some winners in the stock market. I would also get myself familiar with EDGAR, which is the SEC’s database of company filings (EDGAR Quick Guide, Comprehensive EDGAR Guide). EDGAR is far more versatile (and comprehensive) than navigating company websites for their filings. They also have a pretty extensive Publications section that has all sorts of valuable information.

Google Finance

If you want a very quick snapshot of a particular company, I think Google Finance has the most amount of information on a single page and provides the easiest interface to reach it. Simply type in the ticker or name of the company and you can get a wealth of information on one page. You can access their related companies, their latest financials, recent and future events, key stats & ratios, a brief summary as well as links on their company website, list of officers and directors, as well as links to other resource reports such as SEC filings, MSN Money’s listed major holders, etc. All that information is one page, that’s why I like it over other similar services like Yahoo Finance (Yahoo Finance’s advantage is that you can add a lot of technical indicators to their charting services).

Wall Street Journal Markets Data Center

So, armed with that information, you probably have enough to go out and do some serious damage to your portfolio (take that any way you’d like ). Are you ready to be inundated with market data? If so, and my inundated I mean like drinking from a fire hose, then check out the Wall Street Journal Markets Data Center. Pages and pages and pages of financial information at your finger tips. (if it’s intimidating, but that’s okay… and that’s just the home page, you can drill down even more!) It’s absolutely stunning… now go forth and conquer!

Money Magazine recently released the only 7 investments you’ll ever need and, surprise surprise, my favorite firm, Vanguard, was listed first choice for five of the seven. Their founder, John Bogle, was a major proponent of index funds and it shows in their offering, as almost all of Money’s choices were low-expense ratio index funds.

Need another reason to have a mutual fund account at Vanguard? (No, Vanguard doesn’t sponsor this site!)

Blue-chip US-stock fund: Fidelity Spartan 500 Index (FSMKX) because it replicates the S&P 500 with an expense ratio of 0.10% (coincidentally, Vanguard’s version, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund Investor Shares (VFINX) is 50% more expensive with a ratio of 0.15%).

Blue-chip foreign-stock fund: Vanguard Total International Stock Index (VGTSX) because of its solid performance, beating 90% of its peers, and because it’s an index fund with an expense ratio of 0.27%. Another Vanguard fund, the Vanguard FTSE All World Ex-U.S. ETF (VEU), was listed as an alternative.

Small-company fund: T. Rowe Price New Horizons (PRNHX) is an actively managed fund, one of the few actively managed funds they selected, and is “one of the most efficient of the actively managed crowd.” Considering it is actively managed, an expense ratio of 0.8% is pretty good, about half the average.

Value fund: Oh look, another Vanguard fund – the Vanguard Value Index (VIVAX) and its 0.2% expense ratio and a record that trumps 78% of its peers. Value funds go after investments that appear overlooked or beaten down and try earn a little off those cigar butts and dividends, rather than looking for growth potential.

High-quality bond fund: Vanguard Total Bond Market Index (VBMFX) snags this category with a 0.2% expense ratio. Bonds are good to be the rock in your portfolio to give you some grounding as your other investments shoot up and crash down.

Inflation-protected bond fund: This last category was won by Vanguard’s Inflation-Protected Securities Fund (VIPSX) and it’s 0.2% expense ratio (Vanguard’s index funds are ridiculously efficient). “Among TIPS funds, Vanguard Inflation-Protected Securities has several things going for it, including lower costs and better management than you would get if you assembled your own TIPS portfolio. While the fund returned 6.6% over the past five years, you shouldn’t expect it to make a pile of dough. Its job is to protect the money you already have.”

Don’t buy a home to make money because you won’t.

At the end of May, my wife and I will have owned our home for three years. It was a home that we purchased six months behind the burst of the housing boom and one that has still appreciated in the time since, a testament to the strength of the housing market in the area between Baltimore and Washington D.C. In our little development, similarly designed homes have been selling in the $310k-$320k, or about $15k-$25k more than what we paid for our home. Some of those don’t have the full basement renovation ours has, some don’t have new windows (which means they’re 25 years old), and so one might be tempted to say that those homes would sell for a couple thousand more if they did have some of those amenities. Even so, does that mean we “made” $15k-$25k on paper on our home investment?

Nope. We’ve spent $7,000 on new windows and sliding doors (a great deal I think), about $900 to carpet the basement, and will soon spend approximately $5,000 on a new roof. Total those up and you have yourself ~$14k of expenses. Okay, so deduct that from the $15k-$25k and you have an appreciation of $1k-$11k, not bad right? Then consider that we’ve paid nearly $35k in interest payments to the bank (of which a third is returned at tax time) and you see how this “investment” has actually lost us money.

Homeownership isn’t a short-term investment. Not only isn’t it a short-term investment, the majority of the “reward” derived from homeownership has more to do with living a better life than having more zeros in your bank account. Even though we have “lost” money (granted, we would’ve “lost” more had we been renting), we’ve made lots of great memories in the short time we’ve been in this house and had the pride of homeownership.

Life isn’t always about $$$.

Risk is a word that gets thrown around often, especially when referring to the stock market. Experts talk of the dangers of investing in the market and the dangers of not investing in the market. They talk about how you need to take on an acceptable level of risk for your tolerance and how you need to mitigate your desire for fantastic returns by taking on a reasonable level of risk. Risk sounds so risky! So, what are all of these risks and how can you mitigate them? That’s what I sought to finally understand and this is what I learned.

There are a lot of fancy names for risk but the bottom line is that understanding them gives you a better chance are being able to mitigate their effects. You can’t fully reduce risk but through proper diversification, you can reduce their effects on your total portfolio so there isn’t one silver bullet that can take you down.

First, let’s talk about the differences between systematic and unsystematic risk. Systematic risk also known as undiversifiable risk refers to risk that affects an entire market or market category, such as market risk. Short of investing abroad or hedging your bets, you can’t get away from market risk. Unsystematic risk is also known as specific risk and refers to events that affect a small number of stocks, such as the risk of a strike or poor management decisions. You can reduce unsystematic risk by properly diversifying your holdings.

Market Risk

Market risk refers to the risk you take on as a result of investing in a particular market, in my case it would be the United States. Market risk refers to the idea that if the overall market falls, perhaps in response to Fed actions on interest rates, rising costs of oil, etc., then your investment may slide along with every other stock.

To mitigate market risk, you have to diversify your holdings such that you’re not entirely committed to one particular market. An easy example is to diversify your holdings through the purchase of ADRs or emerging/developing/international stocks. In mitigating domestic market risk, you introduce several other risks such as the foreign country’s market risk (known as country risk) and currency risk (impact of the change in exchange rate between the dollar and the foreign currency). However, since you’re diversified, the effect of each of those risks is lowered.

Inflation Risk

Inflation risk refers to the risk you take by not investing your money, stock market brokers love this risk . Inflation, which most rules of thumb peg at around 3-4% a year, erodes the purchasing power of your money every single year. If you don’t get 3-4% annual returns on your dollar, you’re effectively losing that money each and every year.

You mitigate inflation risk by investing your funds, but this naturally introduces a whole hosts of other risks. The only difference here is that inflation risk is a near certainty – inflation doesn’t roll the dice to see if she’ll erode your money this year, she always takes it.

Manager Risk

Manager risk, or management risk, refers specifically to the risk that your mutual fund, or the company you’ve invested in, will suffer as a result of ineffective, poor, or under-performing management. It essentially points to the fact that the company or fund may be sound but the management made bad decisions that cause the stock price or fund price to suffer.

This is difficult to mitigate outside of diversifying your assets because you often won’t see anything that could clue you in. Oftentimes, managers simply make bad decisions or bad bets and it’s nothing intentional. You don’t see many Enrons and, even if you did, there are no obvious signals warning you that something is foul. Simply do your research and be confident that the manager of the fund you’re interested in has a long, strong and solid history of performance.

A close relative of manager risk is active risk, which refers to the risk associated with a manager of a mutual fund trying to beat his or her benchmark. Active refers to actively trading, or active mutual fund (vs. passive index mutual fund), and it’s been shown that the more active the fund, the more divergent it will be with respect to returns vs. its benchmark. Sometimes you beat the benchmark, sometimes you don’t, that’s active risk.

All Other Risks

There are plenty of other risks out there with fancy names like Political Risk (effect of political instability or changes in a foreign country), Liquidity Risk (lack of demand for your investment might make it difficult to sell), Reinvestment Risk (you can’t reinvest your funds at the same rate, or at all), etc. but I felt that those big ones were the only ones worth focusing on at this point. There are a lot of risk terms out there that can get as specific or as general as you could ever possibly want, but understanding market, inflation, and manager risk is usually sufficient for most purposes.

When I was first approached to review the book titled Beating the Market, 3 Months at a Time, I thought I was looking at one of those “invest in this hot new sector, you’ll be rich in three months.” Then I saw that the publisher was Financial Times Press and that allayed my concerns some more, FT Press isn’t going to put out some day-trading, hawkerish type book and, this is something I learned later, neither of the authors are your BS snake-oil salesmen types.

The book isn’t about day-trading, though Gerald Appel is well known for his technical analysis and marketing timing (Gerald Appel created the Moving Average Convergence / Divergence technical indicator), but about active investing and how it can yield higher returns than “buy and hold” strategies. By active investing, they mean that you can use their strategy to review your portfolio once ever three months (rather than the often advised once a year rebalancing act). So, through active investing and a one hour review every three months, you can beat the market with their proven investing plan. That’s the promise they’re making.

Basic Investing Education

Beating the Market begins by educating the reader on how to put together an investment portfolio, what your goals should be, how you should approach it, and is generally a good primer on investing in general. For example, it’s important to note that you want to get a rate of return greater than the risk-free investments you have available to you. I could put my funds in an E*Trade Online Savings account and get 3.15% risk-free, so my investments have to beat that. (usually the benchmark is money market funds and 90-day T-bills) Another goal is to manage the risk of your investments, something individual investors are notoriously bad at. Emerging markets are always hot and can return big double digit returns, but they can also lose big doubt digits… are you getting enough return for the risk you’re taking?

It Gets Complicated, Quickly

After the eight page primer on putting together a winning investment portfolio, the books slices right into diversification and risk management. I don’t want to recap the entire book but the topics it covers run the gamut from discussing ETFs and emerging markets, to the purpose of bonds in your portfolio, to special bond market investments, and end with discussions of retirement, planning for the political impacts, and an appendix chock full of resources. There is even a chapter called the Definitive Portfolio in which they build out a well diversified example portfolio with a mix of two types of bonds, two types of ETFs, and one overseas component.

The Investing Plan

So what’s this plan I spoke of earlier? The plan is the whole book. By understanding all the pieces of your portfolio (including risks, investment profiles, and all the nitty gritty described in each chapter) and how diversification works to reduce your risk, you can actively participate in the management of your portfolio without having to pay a manager 1-2% of your investments. That’s what active means in their plan, not day trading.

There’s a lot of information in this book and it’s definitely one I will be reading more closely over the next few weeks. There are discussions about high yield “junk” bonds and about the international markets that I glossed over, two things I know very little about, so if you have it at the library or bookstore (I tend to borrow all my books from the library) I wholeheartedly recommend that you pick it up.