Buy 5 Low Beta Stocks To Endure Market Volatility
Zacks Investment Research | Nov 09, 2016 09:53PM ET
Rewards can never come without taking risks. This rule of thumb also true in the investing world and definitely the reward will be more appealing if and only if the market is walking on the bullish path. The reverse scenario is also highly probable and will be painful to bear. We have showed in this article how rewards can also be reaped with low-risk stocks if some parameters are taken into account.
Beta Meaning
Beta measures the volatility or risks to a security relative to the market (we are considering the S&P 500 here). That is, beta measures the extent to which the price of a stock moves with respect to the market.
If the beta is equal to 1 it means that the stock is as volatile as the market. So, a stock is relatively more volatile if it has beta greater than 1 and less volatile if beta is less than 1.
For example, if the beta is 1.8 then the stock will witness 80% more movement than the market. Hence, we can say that if the market goes up, the stock will outperform by 80%. Conversely, if the market plunges, the stock will lose much more value than the market.
Building a Low-Risk Portfolio
In order to find stocks with lower-than-market volatility, we added beta between 0 and 0.6 as our main criterion for screening. However, we need to keep in mind that low beta is not the only metric to be considered for choosing stocks in a volatile market. Hence to reach the winning strategy, we have considered a few additional criteria.
Percentage Change in Price in the last 4 Weeks: We considered those stocks that saw positive price movement over the last month.
Average 20 Day Volume greater than or equal to 50,000: A substantial trading volume ensures that the stocks are easily tradable.
Price greater than or equal to $5: They must all be trading at a minimum of $5 or higher.
Zacks Rank equal to 1: Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) stocks indicate that they will significantly outperform the broader U.S. equity market over the next one to three months. You can see Zacks Investment Research
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