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Modern Portfolio Theory: The Basics of Risk vs. Return

Beginner Investing • 6 min

Harry Markowitz's big idea, which won him a Nobel Prize: combining the right assets can lower a portfolio's risk without necessarily giving up expected return. The math works because assets that aren't perfectly correlated smooth each other out — when one dips, an uncorrelated one is less likely to dip at the exact same time.This produces what MPT calls the 'efficient frontier' — for every level of risk an investor…

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