The debt debate fell into the category of events that could hurt your portfolio, with you having little control over it. The same goes for the drop in stock prices at the end of the week; even if you did everything right with your own finances, your portfolio still could lose value.

Yet there are many risks in people’s investments that they can control. How many investors, for instance, know what is in their portfolios and, more important, how those assets work — or do not work — together? How many people use several financial advisers who do not know what the other managers are doing? These and other common mistakes can expose a portfolio to unintended risks.

“This is a primary issue for individual investors,” said Stephen M. Horan, head of private wealth management at the CFA Institute, an association of investment professionals. “We have a much clearer sense of what return is than what risk is. But losses govern the accumulation of wealth to a dramatic extent.”

Here are three areas of risk that often get overlooked:

SECURITY SELECTION The classic example of unintended risk in a portfolio is the investor who buys six different mutual funds and thinks that equals diversification. What the investor may not realize is that all six funds can own 10 of the same stocks. Instead of diversifying risk, the investor has concentrated it.

Mr. Horan said investors needed to know what their holdings actually were. It is easy. Look up the funds’ Top 10 holdings, available on the fund’s Web site, and the sector concentrations. Then, investors need to have the courage of their convictions. Lynn Ballou, an investment adviser and also an ambassador for the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, said investors inadvertently increased their risk by being swayed by people who had little knowledge of their portfolio.

“It’s, ‘I went out to lunch with someone and he said, wink, wink, nod, nod, I’ve heard about this company and I’m going to buy some and you should, too,’ ” Ms. Ballou said. “All that is what I call sexy noise. And 99 times out of 100, it’s just fun lunch talk.”

But should investors act on those tips, they risk a problem that Chris Walters, executive vice president at Citizens Trust , calls “portfolio happens,” the accumulation of investments that are not part of an overarching strategy and do not work together.

At the extreme, he said, was a client who recently bought $1 million of gold bullion without telling anyone. “We said, ‘How are you going to get it home? What are you going to do with it?’ ” Mr. Walters said. But the best advice is to have a personal benchmark, pegged to when you will need the money, like in retirement. Thomas J. Pauloski, national managing director in the wealth management group at AllianceBernstein, said he urged his clients to do that.

“You want to get people away from focusing on the day-to-day jousting,” he said. In doing this, an investor hopes to reduce the risk of buying high and selling low.

MANAGING SECURITIES The market crash of 2008 has instilled a fear of being overly concentrated with any one manager or firm. But spreading out everything among different people is not the solution, either.

“We think about the best fund managers and do a pretty good job at the beginning of finding them,” Ms. Ballou said. “But we don’t stay on top of them. And then, it’s, ‘I just read my famous fund manager retired or got indicted — what do I do now?’ ”

She said more people should think about who is managing their portfolios the way they would think about a garden: after spending time planting beautiful flowers, they don’t let it go without pruning and weeding.

This discipline is not easy, even among the wealthiest. One investor, whose family’s wealth came from an agricultural products company and inheritance, said it was not until the family decided to move to another financial firm that they found out how much unintended risk was in their portfolio.

The investor, who asked not to be name to protect his family’s privacy, said the family had 5 percent of its $50 million of liquid wealth in Microsoft and 7 to 8 percent in Oracle. But since the stocks were held in various accounts, they did not realize how concentrated they were.

“We looked at the stock statements and not what was in the funds,” he said. “Microsoft and Oracle are great companies, but we didn’t have any other significant holdings.”

BNY Mellon Wealth Management performed the risk audit on the portfolio and the family moved their money to that firm. But Timothy E. Sheehan, senior director for business development at the firm, said the risk audits he did for clients were something anyone could do.

“All of this is public information,” he said. “But when you tell them they own 30,000 different equity shares, they say, ‘How did that happen?’ ”

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