THE ART AND SCIENCE OF RISK MANAGEMENT

It’s hard to define risk in just one short sentence. And it depends on what you’re referring to. Within the world of investing, you have market, credit, currency, and a host of other types of risks. But in the grand scheme of things, it usually means the uncertainty of an outcome.

In terms of our clients, it means the uncertainty or risk of not meeting their financial goals. “No risk, no return” is a core tenet in finance. In order to expect future return, you have to take some risk. How much and which risk to take, is an important component of reaching your financial goals, and it’s our job as your advisor to help you organize & manage that risk.

So how do we do that?

As a starting point, we typically break risk into your capacity to take risk and your attitude to handle risk.  Your capacity to take risk tends to be more quantifiable and tends to revolve around such things your overall wealth, your time horizon, income or outgoing cash flows, and a variety of other factors. The theory in psychology that won a noble prize in economics for helping us understand our faulty perceptions. We encourage right-mindedness and discourage wrong-headedness, as much as we’re involved with quantitative theory.

The second component, your attitude towards risk, reflects how comfortable you are with risk. Making sure that your portfolio reflects your attitude toward risk not only makes it easier for you to sleep at night, but it also helps to ensure that you will stay in your seat when markets are turbulent.

One of the challenges that we face as investors is that risk is usually felt short term, while returns are earned long term. We may experience or feel risk on a day to day basis when reading the news or checking our portfolio, while the power of compounding return occurs in the long run. Albert Einstein said that compound interest is the greatest mathematical discovery of all time and add that it is the most powerful force in the universe.

So how does risk correlate to what you do? The key is to ensure that the level of risk that you’re taking is aligned with your goals, your needs, and your comfort to take risk. Sometimes not taking enough risk doesn’t allow you to meet your goals. Your risk must be matched to your goals and objectives so that they’re attainable.

We take risk very seriously here, whether it’s the risk of individual investments or the risk in your portfolio, or any other types of risk that may compromise your ability to meet your financial goals. We have a unique process that we’ve developed over many years of experience of managing risk. We stress test your portfolios and how they would perform in different economic scenarios. We do thorough due diligence on all of our investments, both before investing and regularly thereafter, and we make sure to stay on top of, as well as understand, the impact of current national and global events.

Our approach is one that’s based on evidence rather than one based on a hunch, because it’s not just your money, it’s your future.