Tham khảo tài liệu 'the four pillars of investing: lessons for building a winning portfolio_6', tài chính - ngân hàng, tài chính doanh nghiệp phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | 110 The Four Pillars of Investing Step One Risky Assets Riskless Assets Distilled to its essence there are only two kinds of financial assets those with high returns and high risks and those with low returns and low risks. The behavior of your portfolio is determined mainly by your mix of the two. As we learned in Chapter 1 all stocks are risky assets as are long-term bonds. The only truly riskless assets are short-term high-quality debt instruments Treasury bills and notes high-grade short-term corporate bonds certificates of deposit CDs and shortterm municipal paper. To be considered riskless their maturity should be less than five years so that their value is not unduly affected by inflation and interest rates. Some have recently argued that Treasury Inflation Protected Securities TIPS should also be considered riskless in spite of their long maturities because they are not negatively affected by inflation. What we ll be doing for the rest of this chapter is setting up a laboratory in which we create portfolios composed of various kinds of assets in order to see what happens to them as the market fluctuates. How we compute the behavior of these portfolios is beyond the scope of this book for those few of you who are interested I suggest that you read the first five chapters of my earlier book The Intelligent Asset Allocator. Suffice it to say that it is possible to simulate with great accuracy the historical behavior of portfolios consisting of many assets. Keep in mind that this is not the same as predicting the future behavior of any asset mix. As we discussed in the first chapter historical returns are a good predictor of future risk but not necessarily of future return. Let s start with the simplest portfolios mixtures of stocks and T-bills. I ve plotted the returns of Treasury bills . stocks as well as 25 75 50 50 and 75 25 mixes of the two in Figures 4-1 through 4-5. In order to give an accurate idea of the risks of each portfolio I ve shown them on the
