3 things investors can learn about risk from the U.S. Army

Major Hugh Jones is a professor of finance and economics at the United States Military Academy and has had two tours of duty in Iraq. He also has an MBA from Duke.

He spoke last year at the CARE conference (Center for Accounting Research and Education conference) about how the U.S. Army deals with high-stakes risk. The video below is his presentation at CARE (thanks to Professor Darren Roulstone for bubbling up  his speech!).

You can get slides of Major Jones’ presentation here [.pdf].

Here’s what investors can learn from how the U.S. Army deals with risk.

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Why risk is so hard to measure

Building on this theme of risk that’s capturing my attention as of late, I wanted to drill down a bit further into this discussion of risk.

One of the things I’ve discussed on my podcast has been how traditional tools used by financial advisors and RIAs aren’t sufficient to get a real handle on our risk.

Risk questionnaires, like the kinds Vanguard uses (one of the better ones by the way), don’t accurately capture our real relationship with risk. There are a variety of reasons why that’s the case but for this post, I wanted to focus on just one aspect of risk and that’s our inability to measure it.

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