9 - Investment and Diversification

Summary

Learning Objectives

People invest their savings in order to attain some specific objectives. The objectives can be short term (such as for education or for a down payment on a house) or long term (such as for retirement). The goal of an investment decision is to choose a portfolio that is optimal for the investor's objective and risk preference.

In this chapter and the next, you will learn about investment decisions – how you should invest your savings and what factors you have to take into consideration when making an investment decision. Because investment is now a very large topic, it is not possible to cover every aspect of it in detail in this book. We concentrate on the most important issues and also on how investment decisions are related to the concept of consumption smoothing.

This chapter discusses the basic principles of investment. It starts by identifying the investment choices that are available to you. We classify these choices into five categories (or asset classes), and examine the risk and return of each asset class. Finally, you learn the concept of asset allocation and diversification.

Investment Decisions and Consumption

Saving and investing for retirement is what most people have to do. Recall from Chapter 4 that under the consumption-smoothing framework, you choose a consumption pattern that maximizes your total standard of living over your lifetime. One factor that determines the pattern of your optimal discretionary consumption is the rate of return that you can get on your savings.