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Portfolio Risk<br />

Stand-alone risk is an important concept to understand, but it is also just the starting point in the study<br />

of risk and return, because investors usually do not hold all of their wealth in a single asset or stock.<br />

Investors typically hold a collection or portfolio of assets, so we need to examine risk in a portfolio<br />

context. Risk and return in a portfolio is very different from stand-alone risk and return due to<br />

diversification effects, which makes the risk of an asset when held in a portfolio lower than the risk of<br />

the asset alone. First we will examine the return of a portfolio, and then we will consider the risk of a<br />

portfolio.<br />

Calculating the return of a portfolio of assets is quite simple, because the return of a portfolio is the<br />

weighted average of the return of the individual assets in the portfolio, with the weights determined by<br />

value. The formula for this calculation is where R P is the return of the portfolio, W i is the weight by<br />

value of asset i, R i is the return of asset i, and you sum these weighted returns for all n assets in the<br />

portfolio.<br />

For example, if asset A is 50% of the value of the portfolio and has a return of 10%, asset B is 30%<br />

of the value of the portfolio and has a return of 15%, and asset C is 20% of the value of the portfolio<br />

and has a return of 18%, then the return of the portfolio is:<br />

The return of any portfolio is the simple weighted average of the returns of the individual assets in<br />

the portfolio. As was true for the risk of an asset held alone, the correct measure of risk for a portfolio<br />

is the standard deviation of portfolio returns. The standard deviation of returns from a portfolio,<br />

however, is not the weighted average of the standard deviations of the individual assets in the<br />

portfolio. The reason this is true is due to the correlation between the assets in a portfolio, which<br />

results in the standard deviation of returns and therefore the risk of a portfolio, is lower than the<br />

standard deviation of returns and risk of the individual assets in the portfolio.

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