Oakland, CA | East Bay; Understanding Volatile Markets, Risk and Return

Hi, my name is Erik Wolfers, I’m the managing member of First & Main Financial. We’ve been helping people with their personal finances since 2001. Today I want to talk a little bit about investing risk.

It’s been well proven that people are on average twice as averse to loss as they are to being excited with gains in their portfolio. We get lots of calls when markets are volatile to the downside, but we virtually never get calls or emails when we make people lots of money. And that’s normal, it’s human—but the concept of risk is not completely understood by many people. There is the possibility to invest your money in such a way that you will experience permanent loss, but with a well-constructed diversified portfolio, you should never lose money. The function of losing money should be whether you have to sell at an inopportune time.

So this ties into a bigger plan for your finances. You want to make sure that you have cash reserves or possibly access to equity in your house so that you can ride through volatile periods in the market—but volatility pays.

You want to have some amount of volatility in your portfolio likely, even if you’re retired because the volatility goes on the downside and upside, and the upside volatility provides positive return which allows for income to be produced inside of a portfolio for years, decades.

It’s good to understand how volatility works and understand how risk really works so that you can achieve better outcome with your wealth, building up to retirement and in retirement.

If you are looking for some financial guidance; whether for a one time financial plan or continuing advice on your investments, we invite you to meet with a First & Main Financial planner for a free consultation. We would be more than happy to sit down with you, assess your situation and review our services to help navigate your financial future.