Types of Investment Risk

Free CFP Exam lesson in Investment Planning. 15 min read, ~2,240 words.

Systematic risk (market-wide, nondiversifiable): interest rate, inflation, currency, reinvestment, political; investors are compensated for bearing it. Unsystematic risk (company-specific, diversifiable): business, financial, credit, liquidity, concentration; eliminated by holding 20-30 uncorrelated positions. Beta measures systematic risk only and feeds CAPM; standard deviation measures total risk. R-squared 0.70 = use Treynor (beta)...

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