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Risk & Return - a Trade Off

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Risk & Return, a trade off
What is a risk?

Dictionary meaning of risk could be exposure, hazard, uncertainty, and chance. It conveys a negative sense like possibility of incurring loss or misfortune or injury. It is the probability that a hazard may turn into a disaster or, in other words, the probability that a disaster may happen. Fortunately, risk can be foreseen and managed by various ways such as (i) passing it on to others through insurance, guarantees and sub-contracting, (ii) sharing it by formation of consortium or syndicates, or (iii) reducing it by diversification of possessions or portfolio.

What is a return?

It means compensation, gain, income, reward, pay off or yield. It would be notice that the word ‘return’ conveys a positive sense as against the word ‘risk’ which forewarns of dangers.

Risk & Return Trade Off

When one says high risk, high returns, it means that chance of getting high returns are most uncertain or lower. To be blunt, an investor can get high return if he or she is willing to sustain a total losse like in a lottery.

One may purchase a share in the stock-exchange in the hope of making a big profit over a short period of time. This is not investing but gambling as there is no guarantee that one will get the desired returns. Some shares in the past have shown a tremendous growth but such occurrences are rare.

Source: wikipedia.org

Risk & Return

Two Major Investment Soundness Indicators

1 - Internal Rate of Return (IRR)

Simply put, IRR is a rate of return just like Annual Compound Growth Rate or Annualized ROI (Return on Investment). To be formal, it is a rate of discount which equates the future cash flow to the present investment or opportunity.

It is widely used as it conveys rate of return in % which can be easily compared with any of the following called hurdle rates:

Average Weighted

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