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I had a goofy little thought the other day: Wouldn’t it be nice if companies offered a price protection guarantee on their stocks like some stores do on their products? (Buy it today, and if it goes down within x number of days, we’ll refund the difference.) How nice would that be? You could buy shares at $38, confident in the idea that if they dropped the next day or week you would get a refund of the difference.

Besides making me laugh a little, the idea caused me to realize just how big a role uncertainty can play in even small decisions if I let it.

I stare at a few different stocks, wondering which to buy this month. What if I choose one and it drops 30% the next week? Will I beat myself up over choosing the “wrong” stock? What if I choose one and it does just fine, but the one I didn’t choose skyrockets? Will I kick myself? Ugh. It’d be nice if there was a little less uncertainty.

But there’s always going to be uncertainty and risk in the stock market. That’s just part of how things are. Pretending to myself that there is a price protection guarantee on the stocks might be one way to eliminate the noise of uncertainty from my decision-making process, so that I can make an attempt to estimate the real level of risk and the actual things within the companies themselves that might affect stock prices over the long term. Of course there are additional factors, but that seems like a good place to start.

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