Stand-Alone Risk
by MaestriRisk is defined in Webster’s as “a hazard; a peril; exposure to loss or injury.” Thus, risk refers to the chance that some unfavorable event will occur. If you engage in skydiving, you are taking a chance with your life—skydiving is risky. If you bet on the horses, you are risking your money. If you invest in speculative stocks (or, really, any stock), you are taking a risk in the hope of making an appreciable return.
An asset’s risk can be analyzed in two ways: (1) on a stand-alone basis, where the asset is considered in isolation, and (2) on a portfolio basis, where the asset is held as one of a number of assets in a portfolio. Thus, an asset’s stand-alone risk is the risk an investor would face if he or she held only this one asset. Obviously, most assets are held in portfolios, but it is necessary to understand stand-alone risk in order to understand risk in a portfolio context.
To illustrate the risk of financial assets, suppose an investor buys $100,000 of short-term Treasury bills with an expected return of 5 percent. In this case, the rate of return on the investment, 5 percent, can be estimated quite precisely, and the investment is defined as being essentially risk free. However, if the $100,000 were invested in the stock of a company just being organized to prospect for oil in the mid-Atlantic, then the investment’s return could not be estimated precisely. One might analyze the situation and conclude that the expected rate of return, in a statistical sense, is 20 percent, but the investor should recognize that the actual rate of return could range from, say, 1,000 percent to 100 percent. Because there is a significant danger of actually earning much less than the expected return, the stock would be relatively risky.
No investment should be undertaken unless the expected rate of return is high enough to compensate the investor for the perceived risk of the investment. In our example, it is clear that few if any investors would be willing to buy the oil company’s stock if its expected return were the same as that of the T-bill.
Risky assets rarely produce their expected rates of return—generally, risky assets earn either more or less than was originally expected. Indeed, if assets always produced their expected returns, they would not be risky. Investment risk, then, is related to the probability of actually earning a low or negative return—the greater the chance of a low or negative return, the riskier the investment. However, risk can be defined more
precisely, and we do so in the next section.
Taken From : Five-Minute MBA – Corporate Finance
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