3 Ways to Measure Mutual Fund Risk

There are main indicators of investment risk that apply to the analysis of stocks, bonds and mutual fund portfolios. They are alpha, beta, standard deviation. All of these risk measurements are intended to help investors determine the risk-reward parameters of their investments. In this article, we'll give a brief explanation of each of these commonly used indicators.

Alpha

Alpha is a measure of an investment's performance on a risk-adjusted basis. It takes the volatility (price risk) of a security or fund portfolio and compares its risk-adjusted performance to a benchmark index. The excess return of the investment relative to the return of the benchmark index is its "alpha."  Simply stated, alpha is often considered to represent the value that a portfolio manager adds or subtracts from a fund portfolio's return. An alpha of 1.0 means the fund has outperformed its benchmark index by 1%. Correspondingly, an alpha of -1.0 would indicate underperformance of 1%. For investors, the higher the alpha the better.

Beta

Beta, also known as the "beta coefficient," is a measure of the volatility, or systematic risk, of a security or a portfolio in comparison to the market as a whole. Beta is calculated using regression analysis, and you can think of it as the tendency of an investment's return to respond to movements in the market. By definition, the market has a beta of 1.0. Individual security and portfolio values are measured according to how they deviate from the market.

A beta of 1.0 indicates that the investment's price will move in lock-step with the market. A beta of less than 1.0 indicates that the investment will be less volatile than the market. Correspondingly, a beta of more than 1.0 indicates that the investment's price will be more volatile than the market. For example, if a fund portfolio's beta is 1.2, it's theoretically 20% more volatile than the market.

Conservative investors looking to preserve capital should focus on securities and fund portfolios with low betas, while those investors willing to take on more risk in search of higher returns should look for high beta investments.

Standard Deviation

Standard deviation measures the dispersion of data from its mean. In plain English, the more that data is spread apart, the higher the difference is from the norm. In finance, standard deviation is applied to the annual rate of return of an investment to measure its volatility (risk). A volatile stock would have a high standard deviation. With mutual funds, the standard deviation tells us how much the return on a fund is deviating from the expected returns based on its historical performance.