To reduce the risk of losing capital when investing, you should diversify your investment portfolio.
Diversification means spreading your capital across different investments to reduce your overall investment risk. So, if one investment performs poorly over a certain period, other investments may perform better over that same period, reducing the overall losses of your investment portfolio.
Diversification is a vital strategy for all investors. Generally, particular investments or asset classes will perform better than others over a specific period depending on a range of factors including:
current market conditions
interest rates, and
currency markets.
No particular investment consistently outperforms other investments.
For example, during periods of increased sharemarket volatility, your share portfolio may suffer losses. If you also hold investments in other asset classes such as fixed interest or direct property that may perform better over the same period, the returns from these investments will smooth the returns of your overall investment portfolio.
Diversification within an asset class, such as investing across sectors in Australian shares, also reduces your overall losses for a specific period, as one sector may outperform another over the same period.
So, by diversifying your investments, you can achieve smoother, more consistent investment returns over the medium to longer term.
Diversifying your investment portfolio
Diversifying your investment portfolio means spreading risk by investing:
across different asset classes such as cash, fixed interest, property, Australian and international shares
within asset classes such as purchasing shares across different industry sectors
across different fund managers if investing in managed funds, and
into different investment structures, such as inside and outside of superannuation
In the past few years with the growth in financial service industry, investors have been offered with a plethora of products and services. There have been multiple avenues for the investors for parking their funds depending on their risk profile and return expectations (Malkiel 2003).
The different investment avenues offer investors with an option to invest in specific or diversified assets. These assets can range from financial assets like stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign exchange to real sector assets like infrastructure, real estate and manufacturing.
Over the past few years, the large financial institutions, high net worth investors and even retail investors have had the choice to outsource their investment decision to some one who specializes in the field on investment and has much more resources and market information than these entities. This helps these “managers” in getting better returns than a normal individual in the market. These “managers” in return charge a particular fee in lieu of their services; this fee depends on things like regulatory conditions, type of competence required for the investment and historical performance of the manager.
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Diversified international investment offers investors higher expected returns and/ or reduced
risks vis-à-vis exclusively domestic investment. Here we will discuss the sources and sizes of
these gains from venturing overseas for portfolio investment, which is investment in equiti
bonds where the investor’s holding is too small to provide any effective control.
The Advantages of International Portfolio Diversification
1. Spreading risk: Correlations between national asset markets
Because of risk aversion, investors demand higher expected returns for taking on investments
with greater risk. It is a well-established proposition in portfolio theory that whenever there is
imperfect co-relation between different assets’ returns, risk is reduced by maintaining only a
portion of wealth in any individual asset. More generally, by selecting a portfolio according to
expected returns, variances of returns, and co-relations between returns, an investor can achieve
minimum risk for a given expected portfolio return, or maximum expected portfolio return for a
given risk. Furthermore, ceteris paribus, the lower are the co-relations between returns on
different assets, the greater are the benefits of portfolio diversification.
International Journal of Marketing, Financial Services & Management Research________________________ ISSN 2277- 3622
Vol.2, No. 4, April (2013)
Online available at www.indianresearchjournals.com
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Because of different industrial structure in different countries, and because different economies
do not trace out exactly the same business cycle, there are reasons for smaller co-relations of
expected returns between investments in numerous different countries than between investments
within any one country. This means that foreign investments offer diversification benefits that
cannot be enjoyed by investing only at home, and for example, that a US investor might include
British stocks in a portfolio even if they offer lower expected returns than US stocks; the benefit
of risk reduction might more than compensate for lower expected reการกระจายการลงทุนระหว่างประเทศ การกระจายการลงทุนระหว่างประเทศ สามารถช่วยให้นักลงทุนซึ่งมีความคาดหวังในด้านผลตอบแทนสูงได้รับผลประโยชน์ ดังนี้ 1)ช่วยในการกระจายความเสี่ยงในการลงทุน เนื่องจาก