How to work out your risk capacity? [video]

Investing always demands some sort of risk...

In this video you'll learn:

how a financial adviser can work out your risk capacity;
how your stage of life can affect your risk capacity; and
why you should get your risk capacity properly assessed.

Transcript

Robin Powell: All investing involves a degree of risk, and every one of us has a unique capacity for risk. One of the key roles of a financial adviser is to work out, for each client, exactly what that capacity is. There are three main factors to consider.

Greg Davies: One is the risk that you are willing to take in the long term. How much am I willing to trade off risk in return for final outcomes? And then there's a risk that you are able to take, and there are two flavours of that. One is the risk that you are able to take financially, and that is risk capacity; and the other one is the risk that you're able to take emotionally, which is about your composure levels and your ability to withstand the ups and downs.

Robin Powell: How much risk you are able to take is largely dependent on the stage of life you are at. So for example, a young person with good earning potential has a relatively high capacity for risk.

Greg Davies: So if someone is only investing a small portion of what we can think of as their total wealth, including human capital, then your capacity is high. If someone however – if I put all my investable assets into the market and I have now just retired, and all I have ahead of me is no more income coming in, I've just got liabilities in the future. I've got spending to fund; this is a situation where my capacity is low. So risk capacity at its heart is simply put: am I investing a small or a very large part of my total wealth? And that tells me something about my financial ability to take risk with this pool of assets.

Robin Powell: Greg Davies says, in his view, there’s been too much emphasis in the past on risk tolerance — and not enough on our ability to take risk. A good adviser will get the balance right.

Greg Davies: Now if you're exceedingly wealthy – that isn't a problem because, typically, you have enough capacity to fund all your future expenditure without going broke; and so, for the really high end of the wealth market, risk capacity is a secondary consideration to risk tolerance. For most of the world's investors, the opposite is true. Risk capacity is actually the more important part of the puzzle. The risk you're able to take is far more important than the risk you're willing to take, because it is the financial fact that you might run out of money that is the constraining variable, not your ability to trade-off risk and return emotionally in the long term.

Robin Powell: So, if you haven’t had your risk capacity properly assessed, you should speak to a financial adviser who knows how to do it. The older you are, the more important that becomes.

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How to work out your risk capacity? [video]

Investing always demands some sort of risk...

Transcript

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