Making Cents: Understanding This ‘Risk’ Business

When investing money, don’t think in terms of a single idea of risk. Is the stock market riskier than a federally insured bank account? Only in some ways. “People tend to put all their money in CDs because they think of default risk, but there’s credit risk, tax risk, inflation risk, interest rate risk, currency risk. Not one investment is immune to all of them,” says Ric Edelman of Edelman Financial Services in Fairfax, Va.