风险和回报 Risk And Return

People are usually saying, no risk no return. But I am saying If you don’t know the risk associated with the investment, sometimes you assumed all the risks without the return. I had a painful experience when I invested a lot in gold without knowing its real risk. The price is volatile and it doesn’t pay dividend. It is a speculation and I eventually lost big to learn a huge lesson.

人们总是说，没有风险没有回报。但是如果你不了解这个投资的风险，有些时候你背负了所有风险却没有回报。我曾经有因为一个不了解风险，投资黄金的痛苦教训。黄金的价格变化很大，持有也不分红。这一次投机是我损失了很多资金，学了很沉重的一课。

People are buying investment based on their perception of return and sometimes ignored the risk or mis-assessed the risk. Risk is modeled in the financial term as volatility. It is the variation of the trade price over time. In statistics, it is measured by standard deviation. Intuitively to average investor, we can see some stock price jumping up and down, for example, TSLA, which can go from $200 to $2000 in one year and some other investment, like the money market fund, the price doesn’t move.

人们通常买资产都是看中想象中的回报，往往忽略或者误判了风险。风险在金融里通常用波动性来建模。通常是一段时间里价格变化。统计上用标准偏差来计算。直觉上来说，我们能看一些股票比如特斯拉(Tesla),能够一年从两百多到两千多，而另外一些投资，比如货币市场资金，价格几乎不变。

But if you don’t know the risk, sometimes, you assumed a much bigger risk than you thought. One example is investing in gold. People turned to use gold as a hedge. But often it is not true because there is no direct link of opposite performance. When people used gold to hedge 2016 US election market crash, it was a big fallout. But if you think the future for U.S. economy is good, you should keep investing in U.S. market with total understanding of price volatility and stay in the market. If you want to hedge the market risk, buying put option makes more sense than buying gold.

如果你不明白投资的风险，有时候你背负了比你想象中大很多的风险。一个例子是黄金。人们希望用黄金来对冲市场崩溃，但是这常常是不对的, 这两者并没有直接相反的关联。当人们用黄金来对冲美国2016选举产生市场崩溃，结果是非常错误的。如果你认为美国市场长期看好，你应该持续投资并且长期持有，如果想要对冲市场，买put option比买黄金更直接。