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Sequence of Returns Risk: Why the ORDER of Your Returns Matters

Portfolio Construction and Risk • Beginner Investing • 7 min

Two investors can experience the exact same average annual return over a 20-year period — say, 7% per year on average — and end up with dramatically different final results, purely because of which specific years the good returns and bad returns happened to occur in. This is sequence of returns risk: the recognition that the ORDER in which returns occur, not just their long-run average, can significantly affect an…

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