Everyone teaches you what to buy. Almost nobody teaches you how much, what it costs you when it goes wrong, and how you get out. This free course is the other half of investing — the half that decides whether you are still here in ten years.
Avoiding the deep hole matters more than catching the big winner, because the hole compounds against you at exactly the rate your winner compounds for you.Start Module 1 →
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What you'll be able to do
Separate the two things people call “risk” — volatility and permanent loss of capital — and know which one should actually change your behaviour.
Do the drawdown arithmetic in your head, and explain why a 50% loss needs a 100% gain to get back to even.
Read standard deviation, beta and maximum drawdown correctly, including the specific situations where each one lies to you.
Work out what your portfolio’s real diversification is, rather than assuming twenty holdings means twenty bets.
Size a position from the loss you can tolerate rather than from how much you like the company.
Measure your concentration by stock, sector, factor and currency — including the concentration hiding inside your index funds.
Understand what leverage and margin actually do to your risk of ruin, and why a margin call is a liquidity event, not a valuation one.
Write exit rules in advance — and tell a thesis break apart from ordinary noise.
Explain sequence-of-returns risk and why the same average return can fund or sink a retirement.
Produce a one-page written risk policy for your own portfolio, and stress-test it against real historical drawdowns.
The syllabus
Ten modules, Foundation → Core → Advanced → Mastery. Each stands on its own, but they build: the arithmetic in Modules 2–4 is what makes the position-sizing rules in Module 5 more than opinion.
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Common questions
What is risk management in investing?
Risk management is deciding in advance how much you can lose, how that loss would be distributed across your holdings, and what you will do when it happens. In practice it comes down to four levers: how much you own of any one thing (position sizing), how correlated your holdings are, how much borrowed money is involved, and what rules trigger you to sell. Picking good investments is a separate skill; risk management is what keeps a run of bad luck or bad judgement from ending your investing entirely.
Is volatility the same thing as risk?
No. Volatility measures how much a price moves around; risk is the chance of permanently losing money you needed. For a long-term investor who will not be forced to sell, volatility is mostly discomfort. It becomes real risk in three specific cases: when you are forced to sell at a bad time (a margin call, a job loss, a cash need), when the volatility reflects a business genuinely deteriorating, and when it is severe enough to make you abandon a sound plan.
How much of my portfolio should one stock be?
There is no universal number, but the arithmetic in Module 5 gives you a defensible one for your own situation: decide the largest loss you can accept in your total portfolio from a single name being wrong, estimate how far that name could realistically fall, and divide. If you can tolerate a 2% hit to the portfolio and a stock could plausibly fall 50%, that is a 4% position. Individual stocks in a concentrated portfolio commonly sit between 2% and 8%; single positions above 10% need a deliberate reason.
Do I need an account to take this course?
No. The course is free and requires no account. Your progress, quiz scores and notes are saved privately in your own browser using localStorage, and you can export your notes as a markdown file to keep them.
Does this course cover Canadian investors specifically?
Yes. Module 7 covers currency risk for Canadians holding US and international stocks, including hedged versus unhedged ETFs and what currency does to a portfolio in a crisis. Module 6 covers the concentration problem specific to the TSX, where financials and energy dominate the index, and Module 10 covers sequence-of-returns risk in the context of RRIF minimum withdrawals.
Educational purposes only — not investment advice. This course teaches a way of thinking about risk; it does not tell you how much risk is right for you, which depends on your circumstances, timeline and obligations. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Historical drawdown figures are illustrative and are not forecasts. RiskStock is not a registered dealer or adviser. Always do your own research and consult a licensed advisor.