INVESTING FOR BEGINNERS
● Understanding the basics of how money works can go a long way in educating us on making decisions on investments
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here are three ways an investment can make money. One, by lending money to someone who pays interest on it, be it a business or a government.
Two, by becoming a part-owner of a business, like having a share in it. And three, by buying something that becomes more valuable with time, such as gold or real estate. The universe of investment options boils down to just these three components. This simplifies the task of understanding investments.
Step one of understanding each investment would be to think along these terms:
When you lend to a business (by making a fixed deposit, for example), your gains are limited to the interest rate that the business (bank) has agreed to pay you. No matter how successful that business may become, you are not going to get more than that.
When you own shares (or equity, as it is often called) in a business, you could make big profits if the business does well or make losses if it does badly. The risks are high and the potential of reward is also high.
In the third kind of investment, when you buy something like gold and real estate, if the price goes up that’s great and if it goes down then you lose money.
In investing jargon, the first type (lending) is called debt, or fixed income investing. The second type (owning) is called equity investing, with stock or shares being synonymous for equity. The third type is gold and real estate.
All these terms are called asset types and almost everything that you invest in can be classified as one of these asset types. For example, bank deposits or company deposits are debt while buying shares or investing in equity mutual funds is equity.
While there are a lot of ways in which investments differ from each other, there are three basic characteristics that define them.
a) Risk: The likelihood of an investment not fetching the return you expect from it.
b) Returns: How much gain or loss the investment fetches over time.
c) Liquidity: Whether you can withdraw your money at any time during the investment period.
Each of these three factors has some nuances. So, risk can be defined as the likelihood of loss, or the possibility of not getting the expected return. Generally, debt has the lowest risk and equity the highest.
Returns are the main goal of any investment and they are the flip side of risk. Normally, higher returns come with higher risk. Again, the defining example of this is the debt to equity comparison.
Debt investments have less risk and low returns but equity can have higher returns but with higher risk. Since there are huge variations within equity, it is perfectly possible to have higher risk and poor returns as well. In fact, that’s what most careless or overconfident equity investors actually get.
Liquidity is about getting your money back on demand. For example, if you keep your money in a savings bank account, you can walk into any ATM anywhere in the world and immediately withdraw it, subject to some limits. If you go into a bank, you can withdraw all of it.
In some investments, there could be a penalty for liquidity. In a fixed deposit, you either wait for the whole term or withdraw earlier and settle for less return. In equity, liquidity varies from stock to stock owing to demand and supply. — The writer is Director, Gulf & Eastern Mediterranean, Franklin Templeton Investments in Dubai