Jasz
VIP Contributor
The two important aspects of investment decisions are return and risk. The return is the profit you make if you choose to invest in something, while the risk is the chance that you can lose money.
The return on an investment is measured by its rate of return. It shows how much your money will gain or lose with each dollar invested. If your investment earns 5% a year, each dollar you put into it will earn $0.05 in interest income. You can also calculate what your initial investment would have been worth after a particular period of time, such as one year or three years from now, by measuring how much more or less than 1% per year it earned for each year of the investment period.
The risk involves potential losses that could occur from investing in certain investments. For example, if you buy stocks in a company that goes out of business, you may lose all your money. If you invest too much in a single stock and then it falls in value due to bad news about its company's performance or because there was an economic slowdown, then your entire investment could be at risk if it falls below a certain level (known as “breaking even”).
The return on an investment is measured by its rate of return. It shows how much your money will gain or lose with each dollar invested. If your investment earns 5% a year, each dollar you put into it will earn $0.05 in interest income. You can also calculate what your initial investment would have been worth after a particular period of time, such as one year or three years from now, by measuring how much more or less than 1% per year it earned for each year of the investment period.
The risk involves potential losses that could occur from investing in certain investments. For example, if you buy stocks in a company that goes out of business, you may lose all your money. If you invest too much in a single stock and then it falls in value due to bad news about its company's performance or because there was an economic slowdown, then your entire investment could be at risk if it falls below a certain level (known as “breaking even”).