Introducing the RiskRatings

We have just this morning released a suite of new features to the Stockopedia site - including the RiskRatings and the StockRank Styles.  I will be explaining these features in an extensive webinar at 1pm today (Thursday 4th May) - (Replay link is here).  The following piece is the copy from our RiskRatings Ebook which can be downloaded for iPad, Kindle, PDF or read online here.  I will be publishing another post about the StockRank styles in due course.

The RiskRatings are Stockopedia’s classification of the market volatility of every company’s share price. We have designed the RiskRatings to be both a useful predictive measure of future volatility, but also an easy to use measure for accessing the “low volatility anomaly” - the unusual fact in equities, that lower volatility securities tend to outperform high volatility securities over the long term.
The five classifications (from least to most volatile) are Conservative, Balanced, Adventurous, Speculative and Highly Speculative. At any time 10% of the market will be classified as Conservative, 15% Balanced, 20% Adventurous, 25% Speculative and 30% Highly Speculative.

In general, larger, more predictable and more profitable companies (such as Microsoft or Unilever)...