Arguably the hardest step in investing is the first step. Investors who are just starting out face a sometimes bewildering array of choices, a deluge of advice and the dread that if they make a mistake, they will lose everything.
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It does not have to be that difficult, though. By following a few general guidelines, investors can make their initial forays into the market. Consider sample, or model, portfolio allocations. These give investors a rough outline of how to apportion their money, however much money they may have.
Large What?
Terms like "large cap" and "value" are vague, but they also tend to mean what you think they should mean. Telstra, for instance, is a very large company that has a P/E below the market average and a higher-than-average dividend yield. Not surprisingly, it is considered a large-cap value stock. On the other hand, Rio Tinto is growing faster and has richer multiples - making it a large-cap growth stock.
For the sake of simplicity, we are looking only at stocks and bonds here. Other investment categories like hard assets (commodities and precious metals) and real estate certainly have a proper place in personal finance, but those go beyond the scope of this piece.
Model #1 - The Risk-Seeking Approach
A risk-seeking investor is typically one with a long investment horizons (decades) and a willingness to trade volatility and uncertainty for higher overall returns. A risk-seeking approach is going to prioritize growth over value, smaller market capitalisation over larger, and will lean more towards international diversification. Fixed income is not likely to be a major part of the portfolio, apart perhaps from international bond and/or lower-rated corporate bonds.
5% - Large-cap value 20% - Large-cap growth 10% - Mid-cap value 25% - Mid-cap growth 15% - Small-cap value 20% - Small-cap growth 5% - Fixed-income Foreign / domestic - 50% / 50%
Model #2 - The Risk-Tolerant Approach
10% - Large-cap value 15% - Large-cap growth 15% - Mid-cap value 20% - Mid-cap growth 15% - Small-cap value 15% - Small-cap growth 10% - Fixed income Foreign / domestic - 35% / 65%
As you can see, this is a much more balanced approach than the first portfolio. This approach surrenders some of the growth opportunities of the more aggressive approach in exchange for a bit more conservatism and predictability.
Model #3 - The Risk-Limiting Approach
25% - Large-cap value 10% - Large-cap growth 20% - Mid-cap value 10% - Mid-cap growth 15% - Small-cap value 5% - Small-cap growth 15% - Fixed income Foreign / domestic - 25% / 75%
This portfolio is better suited for an investor who believes "slow and steady" wins the race, as well as investors who do not want so much month-to-month or year-to-year volatility in their results. Still, there should be more than enough growth in this sort of allocation to outpace inflation.
Security Selection - How Do I Choose?
Given this sea of numbers, how should a beginning investor turn those allocation percentages into actual candidates? A lot of that depends upon the time you have to devote to the work and your confidence in your own abilities to pick individual stocks.
Stocks and Managed Funds
It takes a few hours to properly research a single stock. In that same time, you can thoroughly research a managed fund, and you can search for them by broad characteristics like "large-cap growth". Moreover, an individual managed fund is not going to be nearly as volatile or risky as any single one of its holdings. In other words, pick the wrong stock and you could have a 20% loss in one week, but you are unlikely to see such a sharp decline in a fund. Of course, the reverse is true as well - if you can "out-pick" a fund manager, you will outperform.
Picking Stocks
Individual stock selection is also always an option. This takes the most time and the most effort, but it allows you to invest in more or less exactly the sorts of companies you want to own. It may take a bit more work here to distinguish growth from value or foreign from domestic, such as News Corporation gets a lot of its revenue from overseas and is not 100% Australian company; but there is no need for absolute precision here.
Investors do not have to go 100% in any direction. Especially for beginners, it may make more sense to buy one or two individual stocks and then round out the portfolio with ETFs and managed funds. As you become more comfortable with individual stock analysis and selection, you can gradually replace more and more of the holdings with individual stocks. By the same token, you may find that you are better at selecting managers or ETF concepts than individual companies.
The Bottom Line
In any case, the most important step of all is to begin investing. We have laid out some starting options
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