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How much risk can I sit through without selling in a panic?
It takes about two to three minutes. Your answers stay in this browser tab.
Your risk profile
Answer all five questions to see your profile.
Written by Elizabeth Stein
Say your five answers score 3, 4, 3, 4 and 3: holding steady or buying more through a hypothetical drop, moderate-to-extensive experience, and a growth-focused goal. That's a total of 17 across five questions, an average of 3.4, which lands above the moderate cutoff of 3 and comes out aggressive. The aggressive profile's base mix is 80% stocks, 10% bonds, 8% international and 2% REITs, with a sample 6.8% return and 18% volatility. Selected in the 41-50 age range, which carries no adjustment, that base mix is also your final result.
Finance Quest is educational. It is not financial advice, and no calculator here knows your full situation.
It's tempting to pick the "buy more at lower prices" answer because that's the disciplined thing to do, even if a real 20% drop would actually make you sell. The quiz is only useful if your answers describe how you actually behave under stress, not how you'd like to behave. Answer as you would act in a real 20% drop, not as you would like to act.
Risk tolerance and risk capacity are different things. Tolerance is how much volatility you can stomach emotionally; capacity is how much your timeline and goals require. If your tolerance quiz says conservative but you're 30 years from retirement, that's worth discussing with an advisor rather than resolving with a five-question quiz.
No, the quiz answers set your base profile first. Age range only nudges the stock and bond split within that profile; it doesn't change whether you land as conservative, moderate or aggressive.
Often, yes. Money you'll need in five years for a house down payment usually calls for a more conservative approach than money in a retirement account you won't touch for thirty years, even if you're the same person answering the same personality questions.
Yes, and it usually does, often becoming more conservative after living through a market decline or as a goal gets closer. Retake the quiz periodically rather than treating one result as permanent.