What Is a Low or High-Risk Investment?
If investors accept the notion that investment risk is defined by a loss of capital and/or underperformance relative to expectations, it makes defining low risk and high-risk investments substantially easier.
A high-risk investment is one where there is either a large percentage chance of loss of capital or underperformance, or a relatively small chance of a devastating loss. The first of these is intuitive, if subjective - if you were told there's a 50/50 chance that your investment will earn your expected return, you may find that quite risky. If you were told that there is a 95% chance that the investment will not earn your expected return, almost everybody will agree that that is risky.
The second half, though, is the one that many investors neglect to consider. To illustrate it, take for example car and airplane crashes. The odds of any driver experiencing a car crash in their lifetime is quite high (25%), but the odds of death are relatively low (less than 1%). By comparison, the odds of experiencing a plane crash are quite low (one-hundredth of 1%), but the odds of dying in a plane crash are quite high (about 67%).
What this means for investors is that they must consider both the likelihood and the magnitude of bad outcomes. Low-risk investing not only means protecting against the chance of any loss, but it also means making sure that none of the potential losses will be devastating.