The Comparison and Selection of Investment Projects: A New Standardized Risk Measure

On the basis of drawdown criterion and investors' target return, a new risk measure called the standardized risk measure is presented in this paper. It is a relative quantity, which defined as the expected loss of value in the required target return divided by the maximum expected loss of value when the probability of failure is guaranteed under the standardized distribution of investment return. The definition is promising and superior to the traditional risk measure in that it readily makes the comparison of different investments be fairly easy and convenient regardless of their currency denominations, given that their return distributions belong to a category with identical standardized distribution.