A Beginner's Guide To Hedging: What Is Hedging?

Although it sounds like it might be the hobby of your neighbor obsessed with his topiary garden full of tall bushes shaped like giraffes and dinosaurs, hedging is a practice every investor should know about - there is no arguing that portfolio protection is often just as important as portfolio appreciation. Like your neighbor's obsession, however, hedging is talked about more than it is explained, making it seem as though it belongs only to the most esoteric financial realms. Well, even if you are a beginner, you can learn what hedging is, how it works and what hedging techniques investors and companies use to protect themselves.

What Is Hedging?
The best way to understand hedging is to think of it as insurance. When people decide to hedge, they are insuring themselves against a negative event. This doesn't prevent a negative event from happening, but if it does happen and you're properly hedged, the impact of the event is reduced. So, hedging occurs almost everywhere, and we see it everyday. For example, if you buy house insurance, you are hedging yourself against fires, break-ins or other unforeseen disasters.

Portfolio managers, individual investors and corporations use hedging techniques to reduce their exposure to various risks. In financial markets, however, hedging becomes more complicated than simply paying an insurance company a fee every year. Hedging against investment risk means strategically using instruments in the market to offset the risk of any adverse price movements. In other words, investors hedge one investment by making another.

Technically, to hedge you would invest in two securities with negative correlations. Of course, nothing in this world is free, so you still have to pay for this type of insurance in one form or another.

Although some of us may fantasize about a world where profit potentials are limitless but also risk free, hedging can't help us escape that hard reality of the risk-return tradeoff. A reduction in risk will always mean a reduction in potential profits. So, hedging, for the most part, is a technique not by which you will make money but by which you can reduce potential loss. If the investment you are hedging against makes money, you will have typically reduced the profit that you could have made, and if the investment loses money, your hedge, if successful, will reduce that loss.

(Source :http://www.investopedia.com)