Voices

Finding new investments to fit your financial outlook

[IMGCAP(2)]Last week I had a great lunch (yeah, fried chicken at MagpieCafe!) with my pal Aaron Klein, CEO and co-founder of Riskalyze.  Aaron and his team are working to bring sanity, perspective and guidance to the average investor with Riskalyze—a tool aimed at helping you get a grip on your risk tolerance and financial outlook, and find appropriate investments that are harmonious with both.

Riskalyze's thesis—which I think is a fair one—is that very few investors have an accurate grasp on their personal tolerance for risk.  Hence they buy and sell like gunslingers, without any plan, and inevitably sell at the bottom, and buy at the top.  Which is part of the reason that most investors—and hell, even most mutual fund managers—underperform market indices!

Step 1 - Enter the stocks or funds that you like

A stumper out of the gate!

●        INTC - I think reports of Intel's demise are greatly exaggerated...and we'll get paid a 3 percent dividend while things play out

●        SLW - The silver rights purveyor, which I like to refer to as "a call option on a call option" in terms of fiat going down

●        GLD – ’Nuff said

●        URA - Uranium has to go up again at some point, right?  (Great start to '12 for URA thus far)

●        WMT - Wall Street is starting to pay more attention to Wal Mart's heavy and increasing dividend

Step 2 - Capture your risk fingerprint

We've got three options:

●        I slowly nurture and grow my money

●        I take risks, but wear a seatbelt

●        I shoot for the stars

I selected the third option - which was true, back in the day, when I had money to invest (that was before I decided a job stunk and a startup was a good idea...but I digress!)

Next I received a few questions to gauge my tolerance - and really my mental calculation when determining risk/reward. For example, would I prefer a guaranteed gain of $417, or a 50 percent chance of losing $10,000 coupled with a 50 percent chance of winning $15,000?  ($10,000 was my the initial "stake" benchmark I used, by

the way).

With an expected return of $2,500, you probably don't have a doubt I rolled the dice on this one.

Step 3 - My economic prediction

As tempting as it was to select an apocalyptic option, I had to temper myself.  This IS an election year after all (actually there are 40 elections worldwide this year, accordingtoJimRogers).  And as Jim puts it, money printing is not only a likelihood, it's probably a guarantee.  2013 is the year to worry about.

As goes Jim, so goes our macro prediction - I selected the sideways market option.

The Result - My current investing roadmap, according to Riskalyze

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Another cool comparison, courtesy of Aaron, is what my profile would look like with varying risk tolerances and economic predictions:

●    His Risk Fingerprint + Historical Returns
●    His Risk Fingerprint + Sideways
●    A Risk-Seeking Investor + Historial Returns

To get your investment roadmap, you can try Riskalyze, for free, here.

Brett Owens is chief executive and co-founder of Chrometa, a Sacramento, Calif.-based provider of time-tracking software that records activity in real time. Previously marketed to the legal community, Chrometa is branching out to accounting prospects. Gains include the ability to discover previously undocumented billable time, saving time on billing reconciliation and improving personal productivity. Brett can be reached at 916-254-0260 and brett@chrometa.com.

 

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