Understand Risk Factors in Investments

Beginning of article

A few weeks ago a wealthy 65-year-old walked into Heidi Steiger's office and demanded that she take his $2 million account out of Treasury bills and throw it all in the stock market.

Steiger, managing director of individual asset management at Neuberger & Berman in New York, said no.

"I told him that if he wanted to invest half of it in stocks and half in bonds, we would have something to talk about," she said. "But here was a man who had never taken any risk at all, and he was talking about going to the opposite extreme with money he couldn't replace if he lost it."

This wealthy man is an indication of what thousands of investors _ even those with much …