Here are good and bad ways to cut risk

Article Excerpt

Diversification is a key way to reduce portfolio risk and volatility, but there are other strategies aimed at cutting portfolio risk and volatility. Those other methods include moving investments into risky assets at regular intervals and buying stocks gradually over time. And then there’s market timing, which aims to sidestep the market’s inevitable down periods. Diversifying your investment portfolio Holding a well-diversified portfolio of high-quality stocks is by far the best way to reduce your risk. It’s also the best way for investors to boost their long-term returns. That’s not to say that some asset groups won’t do better than others in a well-balanced stock portfolio over certain periods. But overall, for investors looking to maximize their gains over time with the least amount of risk, diversification is far better. As an example, consider the performance of 11 popular asset groups, between 2009 and 2019. The graph below shows the number of times an asset group delivered an annual return that ranked in…