As part of defining your investing process, don't forget to spend understanding what you can. All pundits will tell you that you should know your risk profile before starting to invest. There are several tools available on the web to help you gauge your risk profile. Here are a few: Determining Risk And The Risk Pyramid ING Financial Services AOL Money and Finance Once you know your investment risk, how do you gauge individual securities in your portfolio or your portfolio as a whole? I tend to weigh the risk on my portfolio as a whole and make adjustments through the selection of more or less risky investments. For my dividend stocks I look at these measures: 1. S&P Qualitative Risk Assessment + S&P S&P Quality Ranking My broker provides S&P reports on individual securities and most ETF/CEFs. As part of this report S&P includes a Qualitative Risk Assessment and Quality Ranking. They define these as such: Qualitative Risk Assessment: The S&P equity analyst's view of a given company's operational risk, or the risk of a firm's ability to continue as an ongoing concern. The Qualitative Risk Assessment is a relative ranking to the S&P U.S. STARS universe, and should be reflective of risk factors related to a company's operations, as opposed to risk and volatility measures associated with share prices. The rankings include Low, Medium and High. S&P Quality Ranking: Growth and stability of earnings and dividends are deemed key elements in establishing S&P's Quality Rankings for common stocks, which are designed to capsulize the nature of this record in a single symbol. It should be noted, however, that the process also takes into consideration certain adjustments and modifications deemed desirable in establishing such rankings. The final score for each stock is measured against a scoring matrix determined by analysis of the scores of a large and representative sample of stocks.
