The overall interest in investing in stock market is back with full swing. Almost everybody is talking about bonds, IPOs, real estate as if they have been invented recently. Having said that, I love the passion behind it when they talk about it. When folks talk with passion and fire in their bellies, a newbie coming right of the college thinks, wow! that’s the way to go. Recently, a distant family acquaintance was asking me about my opinion about recent surge in IPOs, bonds, and stock market rise. This kid will be graduating next summer (note: next summer, i.e. 2011) from an engineering school and has already got a decent job through campus recruitment. The salary cash flow has not started, and he is already planning to “get-in the market”. He was “researching” what are different methods to make successful “bets” in the market. Continue reading rest of this article…
Learning Points for a Newbie Investor
Risk Analysis of TIPBlog Portfolio 3Q2009
One of the most neglected aspect do-it-yourself investors is performing a realistic assessment of their portfolios. I have adopted a very disciplined approach to make sure I follow my quarterly regime of reviewing the progress. First step was to check out the status. Second step is to understand risk, and third step is to make changes (or execute or re-balance if necessary).
In earlier post, I presented the progress update of TIPBlog portfolio. The next step is to analyze risk in the context of my personal risk profile parameters. The objective of this risk analysis is to make sure that TIP portfolio is not exposed to any particular event, or company, or any other aspect that will affect portfolio performance.
My portfolio management process has a risk management process in which I try to:
- Maintain pre-determined asset class allocation;
- Maintain pre-determined diversification, any sector should not exceed 10%;
- Any single stock should not exceed 7% of the portfolio; and
- Dividends from a single stock should not exceed 5% of total dividend cash flow.
Differentiating Asset Allocation and Diversification
Any investor investing for long term (i.e 10+ years) must use the principles of asset allocation and diversification in their portfolio management process. These are two aspects that help investors to manage risk of investments. This has been said many times, presented many times, and we individual investors still continue to make mistakes. On a personal front I have been guilty of it in recent past. Both asset allocation and diversification are two different aspects and hence they have different objectives. The primary reason individual investors get exposed to downside risk is because many are unable to differentiate between these two aspects.
Asset allocation is a strategy of allocating capital to different types of assets which are either non-correlated or at least have low correlation. The notion here is that, over time, the volatility in returns will smooth out if they have low correlations. The different types of assets that I am discussing here include, cash, government bonds, corporation bonds, common stocks, preferred stocks, real estate, private equity, natural resources, commodities, partnerships, etc.
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