Diversification – Balancing Return and Risk

In my last few post I have touch on two of the three parts of the basics of asset allocation – risk and return, In this post I cover the third part - Diversification . Diversification will help you see how to balance risks and returns into an intelligent strategy.

No one, alas, can eliminate all risk in investing. But by diversifying, you can at least minimize it. There are two ways to diversify.

Real Estate and Bonds
First, you can partially or completely offset your risk by investing in a number of different areas. Let’s say, for example, that you use some of your investment Ghana cedis or dollars to purchase a small apartment building. At the same time, you buy a high-grade cooperate bond.

Your real-estate investment provides a hedge against inflation. As prices rise, the value of your building rises, too. But its value could fall considerably during a prolonged deflationary period.
The value of your bond however, would respond in exactly the opposite way to either inflation or deflation. Inflation would lower the value of the principal you invested in the bond as well as the value of the interest the bond issuer promises to pay you. The effect of deflation, on the other hand, would be to raise both the price you could get for the bond and the value of the interest payments.
What’s important to note is that any change in the value of your building brought on by inflation or deflation probably will be offset by an opposite change in the value of your bond.

So, neither inflation nor deflation would prove disastrous. And if neither of these economic condition become a serious threat, both you building and your bond will still generate healthy returns. You’re braced against the harsh winds of economic change but positioned to profit in the calm of stability.

The second way of diversifying: spreading you holdings in anyone investment area- especially when buying real estate and common stocks, when you diversify by buying shares in a number of companies, say, or several parcels of real estates, your return is more likely to approach the average for that investment category rather than the return on any single investment.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of asset allocation – risk, return, diversification – its time to see how to balance these elements within an intelligent strategy. That’s what I will be touching on in my next post.



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