High-risk investing is better for the young? Why?
What is the importance or benefit of the assumption that high-risk is preferable for younger people/investors instead of older people? Law of averages most high risk investments [stocks for examples, including Mutual funds]. Take any stock market [some have data for nearly 100 years] on a 15 year or 30 years horizon, the year on year growth is around 15 to 18 percentage. Again depends on which country, market etc ... Equally important every stock market in the same 15 year of 30 year time, if you take specific 3 year window, it would have lost 50% or more value. As one cannot predict for future, someone who is 55 years, if he catches wrong cycle, he will lose 50%. A young person even if he catches the cycle and loses 50%, he can sit tight as it will on 30 years average wipe out that loss. The reason that you are advised to take more risk while you are young is because the risk is often correlated to a short investment horizon. Young people have 40-50 years to let their savings grow if they get started early enough.  If you need the money in 5-15 years (near the end of your earning years), there is much more risk of a dip that will not correct itself before you need the money than if you don't need the money for 25-40 years (someone whose career is on the rise). The main focus for the young should be growth. Hedging your investments with gold might be a good strategy for someone who is worried about the volatility of other investments, but I would imagine that gold will only reduce your returns compared to small-cap stocks, for example. If you are looking for more risk, you can leverage some of your money and buy call options to increase the gains with upward market moves. If you spent your whole life earning the same portfolio that amounts $20,000, the variance and volatility of watching your life savings drop to $10,000 overnight has a greater consequence than for someone who is young. This is why riskier portfolios aren't advised for older people closer to or within retirement age, the obvious complementary group being younger people who could lose more with lesser permanent consequence. Your high risk investment choices have nothing to do with your ability to manage other people's money, unless you fail to make a noteworthy investment return, then your high risk approach will be the death knell to your fund managing aspirations. There's two reasons. One is that you have a longer time horizon, other answers cover that. The second is that for someone who is younger, most of their capital is human capital in terms of their future work output (and earnings). If you're 25 and your $20,000 portfolio gets wiped out, that's only a small amount of your total earnings. You still have 45 years in which to earn money (and invest it). If you're 65 and your $1,000,000 portfolio gets wiped out, you're in much bigger trouble. Note that this means that in certain circumstances, a younger investor would want to be more conservative. If you're 25, but got a million dollar settlement for an injury which means you can't work anymore, you want to be more conservative than your average 25-year-old. If you're 65, and just sold a business for which you get $1,000,000 in two years, you can be more aggressive with your currently invest-able portfolio. I'm going to diverge from most of the opinions expressed here. It is common for financial advisors to assume that your portfolio should become less risky as you get older.  Explanations for this involve hand-waving and saying that you can afford to lose money when young because you have time to make up for it later.  However, the idea that portfolios should become less risky as you get older is not well-grounded in finance theory.  According to finance theory, regardless of your age and wealth, returns are desirable and risk is undesirable.  Your risk aversion is the only factor that should decide how much risk you put in your portfolio. Do people become more risk averse as they get older?  Sometimes.  Not always.  In fact, there are theoretical reasons why people might want more aggressive portfolios as they age.  For example: As people become wealthier they generally become less risk averse. Young people are not normally very wealthy. When you are young, most of your wealth is tied up in the value of your human capital.  This wealth shifts into your portfolio as you age. Depending on your field, human capital can be extremely risky--much riskier than the market.  Therefore to maintain anything like a constant risk profile over your life, you may want very safe investments when young.  You mention being a hedge fund manager.  If we enter a recession, your human capital will take a huge hit because you will have a hard time raising money or getting/keeping a job.  No one will value your skills and your future career prospects will fall. You will not want the double whammy of large losses in your portfolio. Hedge fund managers are clear examples of people who will want a very safe personal portfolio during their early working years and may be willing to invest very aggressively in their later working and early retirement years. In short, the received wisdom that portfolios should start out risky and get safer as we age is not always, and perhaps not even usually, true.  A better guide to how much risk you should have in your portfolio is how you respond to questions that directly measure your risk aversion.  This questions ask things like how much you would pay to avoid the possibility of a 20% loss in your portfolio with a certain probability. "There is no rule-of-thumb that fits every person and every situation.  However, the reasons why this advice is generally applicable to most people are simple. Why it is good to be more aggressive when you are young The stock market has historically gone up, on average, over the long term.  However, on its way up, it has ups and downs.  If you won't need your investment returns for many years to come, you can afford to put a large portion of your investment into the volatile stock market, because you have plenty of time for the market to recover from temporary downturns. Why it is good to be more conservative when you are older Over a short-term period, there is no certainty that the stock market will go up.  When you are in retirement, most people withdraw/sell their investments for income.  (And once you reach a certain age, you are required to withdraw some of your retirement savings.)  If the market is in a temporary downturn, you would be forced to ""sell low,"" losing a significant portion of your investment.   Exceptions Of course, there are exceptions to these guidelines.  If you are a young person who can't help but watch your investments closely and gets depressed when seeing the value go down during a market downturn, perhaps you should move some of your investment out of stocks.  It will cost you money in the long term, but may help you sleep at night. If you are retired, but have more saved than you could possibly need, you can afford to risk more in the stock market.  On average, you'll come out ahead, and if a downturn happens when you need to sell, it won't affect your overall situation much." Would my high-risk investment choices, aside from the main question, have any bearing on the road I want to go down and test (managing mutual/hedge funds)? Absolutely!  First of all, understand that hedge fund managers are managing other people's money.  Those people desire a certain risk profile and expected return, so your hedge fund will need to meet those expectations.  Plus, hedge fund managers don't typically get fixed fees alone - they also get a percentage of any gains the fund makes; so managers have a vested interest in making sure that hedge funds perform well.
"Remember that risk should correlate with returns, in an investment. This means that the more risk you take on, the more return you should be receiving, in an efficient marketplace. That's why putting your money in a savings account might earn you <1% interest right now, but putting money in the stock market averages ~7% returns over time. You should be very careful not to use the word 'interest' when you mean 'returns'. In your post, you are calling capital gains (the increase in value of owned property) 'interest'. This may be understating in your head the level of risk associated with property ownership. In the case of the bank, they are not in the business of home construction. Rather than take that risk themselves, they would rather finance many projects being done by construction companies that know the business. The bank has a high degree of certainty of getting its money back, because its mortgages are protected by the value of the property.  Part of the benefit of an efficient marketplace is that risk gets 'bought' by individuals who want it. This means that people with a low-risk tolerance (such as banks, people on fixed incomes, seniors, etc.) can avoid risk, and people with a high risk tolerance (stock investors, young people with high income, etc.) can take on that risk for higher average returns. The bank's reasoning should remind you of the risk associated with property ownership: increases in value are not a sure thing. If you do not understand the risk of your investment, you cannot be certain that you are being well compensated for that risk. Note also that most countries place regulations on their banks that limit the amount of their funds that can be placed in 'higher risk' asset classes. Typically, this something along the lines of ""If someone places a deposit with your bank, you can only invest that deposit in a low-risk debt-based asset [ie: you can take money deposited by customer A and use it to finance a mortgage for customer B]"". This is done in an attempt to prevent collapse of the financial sector, if risky investments start failing." When it comes down to it, long-term investments pay better than short-term ones.  If nothing else, there's less administration and less financial risk for the provider.  That's why 2, 3 or 5 year savings accounts pay better than instant access ones. Higher-risk investments pay more interest (or dividends) than low-risk ones.  They have to, or nobody would invest in them. So by locking yourself out of any long term and/or risky investments, you're stuck with a choice of low-interest short term ones. There are plenty of investment funds that you can sell at short notice if you want to.  But they are volatile, and if you cash out at the wrong time, you can get back less than you invested.  The way you lower risk is either to invest in a fund that covers a broad range of investments, or invest in several different funds. If you're sure you want to go the high risk route: You could consider hot stocks or even bonds for companies/countries with lower credit ratings and higher risk. I think an underrated cost of investing is the tax penalties that you pay when you win if you aren't using a tax advantaged account. For your speculating account, you might want to open a self-directed IRA so that you can get access to more of the high risk options that you crave without the tax liability if any of those have a big payout. You want your high-growth money to be in a Roth, because it would be a shame to strike it rich while you're young and then have to pay taxes on it when you're older. If you choose not to make these investments in a tax-advantaged account, try to hold your stocks for a year so you only get taxed at capital gains rates instead of as ordinary income. If you choose to work for a startup, buy your stock options as they vest so that if the company goes public or sells privately, you will have owned those stocks long enough to qualify for capital gains. If you want my actual advice about what I think you should do: I would increase your 401k percentage to at least 10% with or without a match, and keep that in low cost index funds while you're young, but moving some of those investments over to bonds as you get closer to retirement and your risk tolerance declines. Assuming you're not in the 25% tax bracket, all of your money should be in a Roth 401k or IRA because you can withdraw it without being taxed when you retire.  The more money you put into those accounts now while you are young, the more time it all has to grow. The real risk of chasing the high-risk returns is that when you bet wrong it will set you back far enough that you will lose the advantage that comes from investing the money while you're young. You're going to have up and down years with your self-selected investments, why not just keep plugging money into the S&P which has its ups and downs, but has always trended up over time? In your own example of VW, it dropped from its peak price of $253 to $92. If you had invested $10,000 in VW in April 2015, by September of that year it would have gone down to $3,600. If you held on to your investment, you would now be getting back to $6,700 on that original $10,000 investment. Your own example demonstrates that it is possible to lose. I have a friend who put his fortune into a company called WorldCom (one of the examples D Stanley shared). He actually lost all of his retirement. Luckily he made some money back when the startup we both worked for was sold to a much larger company. Unsophisticated investors lose money all the time by investing in individual companies. Your best bet is to start searching this site for answers on how to invest your money so that you can see actual strategies that reduce your investment risk. Here's a starting point: Best way to start investing, for a young person just starting their career? If you want to better illustrate this principle to yourself, try this stock market simulation game. "I commend you for your desire to be a smart and engaged investor. Regarding the other comments, yes the market is unpredictable and dangerous, but such is everything that leads to profit.  I am currently reading, ""Advanced Options Pricing Models"" (Katz and McCormick) - mighy be at your local library. The book is helpful because in explaining the options market, it covers basic stock methodologies and then builds on them as it pursues a quant's math/computation based view of the market. The book is highly math oriented and discusses authors' custom design scripts/alogrithms to analyze market behavior. See similar post about technical analysis (since it often directs short term trading decisisions)." This depends completely on your investing goals. Typically when saving for retirement younger investors aim for a more volatile and aggressive portfolio but diversify their portfolio with more cautious stocks/bonds as they near retirement. In other words, the volatility that owning a single stock brings may be in line with your goals if you can shoulder the risk. "The article ""Best Stock Fund of the Decade: CGM Focus"" from the Wall Street Journal in 2009 describe the highest performing mutual fund in the USA between 2000 and 2009. The investor return in the fund (what the shareholders actually earned) was abysmal. Why? Because the fund was so volatile that investors panicked and bailed out, locking in losses instead of waiting them out. The reality is that almost any strategy will lead to success in investing, so long as it is actually followed. A strategy keeps you from making emotional or knee-jerk decisions. (BTW, beware of anyone selling you a strategy by telling you that everyone in the world is a failure except for the few special people who have the privilege of knowing their ""secrets."") (Link removed, as it's gone dead)" If you have 100% of your money in one security that is inherently more risky than splitting your money 50/50 between two securities, regardless of the purported riskiness of the two securities. The calculations people use to justify their particular breed of diversification may carry some assumptions related risk/reward calculations.  But these particular justifications don't change the fact that spreading your money across different assets protects your money from value variances of the individual assets.  Splitting your $100 between Apple and Microsoft stock is probably less valuable (less well diversified) than splitting your money between Apple and Whole Foods stock but either way you're carrying less risk than putting all $100 in to Apple stock regardless of the assumed rates of return for any of these companies stock specifically. Edit: I'm sure the downvotes are because I didn't make a big deal about correlation and measuring correlation and standard deviations of returns and detailed portfolio theory.  Measuring efficacy and justifying your particular allocations (that generally uses data from the past to project the future) is all well and good.  Fact of the matter is, if you have 100% of your money in stock that's more stock risk than 25% in cash, 25% in bonds and 50% in stock would be because now you're in different asset classes.  You can measure to your hearts delight the effects of splitting your money between different specific companies, or different industries, or different market capitalizations, or different countries or different fund managers or different whatever-metrics and doing any of those things will reduce your exposure to those specific allocations.   It may be worth pointing out that currently the hot recommendation is a plain vanilla market tracking S&P 500 index fund (that just buys some of each of the 500 largest US companies without any consideration given to risk correlation) over standard deviation calculating actively managed funds.  If you ask me that speaks volumes of the true efficacy of hyper analyzing the purported correlations of various securities.