Understanding Your Investment Risk Tolerance

Most people, once they get safely past their teenage years, have a pretty concrete list of risks they don’t care to take.

Skydiving, for instance, is either on your bucket list or not. After a certain age, you’re either itching to do it or itching to avoid it.

While we tend to get better at assessing risk as we get older, we don’t seem to learn as much about financial risk. In the markets, we seem to be perpetual teenagers, always stepping in too deep for our own good.

Unless the market moves against us once, hard. Then the opposite tends to happen. We get over-concerned about risk to the point that we stop investing completely.

Understanding where you are on this curve is important. If you take too little risk as a young investor, you might leave a lot of money on the table. Failing to realize the advantage of time means your money compounds at a lower rate or not at all. That’s very hard to overcome later in life.

The late saver then tries to do exactly that — to turn back the clock and make up for missing time. That investor then tends to take on too much risk for his or her own good, always pushing the envelope on their investments.

A few early successes is even worse. It’s easy to become convinced of your own investing acumen and to then confuse skill with blind luck. Until, of course, the luck runs out. Even then, we tend to blame the markets, or the government, or the banks, anyone but the person making the actual investments — ourselves.

How can you learn your own risk tolerance? It’s not that hard, really. Here are four basic questions any financial advisor would ask:

1. How long until you need this money?

If you have 30 years to save and invest, it’s likely that you can handle a few market setbacks along the way. This assumption changes a lot if you are just five years away from retirement.

2. How long do you expect to work? To live in retirement?

Many people get to retirement age unready to quit working or unable to do so, having saved too little. If work is part of your retirement plan, you might be able to take on a little more risk than most investors your age. Also, consider how long you might live in retirement. Running out of money in your later years is an avoidable outcome.

3. How do you react when markets go up?

Joy? Champagne? Shopping sprees in celebration? Remember that you haven’t actually made any money until you sell those assets, and that might not be for decades to come. Likewise, some investors take a rising market as a sign to invest more heavily, even if stocks seem expensive.

4. How do you react when markets go down?

Dread? Depression? Fear? Remember, you also haven’t lost any money unless you sell at a bottom. Likewise, investors tend to avoid investing as stock prices fall, which is contrary to the whole concept of “buy low and sell high.”

Correctly measuring investment risk tolerance is an important part of the any long-term retirement plan. Get it right, and you can insulate yourself from the kinds of emotional trading mistakes that plague retirement savers.