Rereading yesterday’s post, I’m reminded of our tendency to look for things to worry about. To me, fretting about the systemic problems of low energy prices and high savings rates is a stretch, a sign that we’ve run out of real concerns.

Eeyore to the rescue! Although I’ve been saying for the past couple of years that the recovery is real and strengthening, I’ve also made a point to keep an eye out for risks.

This will be a short-ish post, as I find myself battling a cold that’s getting worse. The weather, fortunately, seems to be getting better, so hopefully I will too at some point.

Like my health, the economy took a hit this winter. There’s a reasonable chance we’ll see some sort of “snowdown” in the data; indeed, we already have for many data points. The question is whether this represents a meaningful slowdown or, like last year, is simply the result of terrible winter weather.

In my monthly post on the economy, I look at five different indicators that, in the past, have warned of a recession coming in the next 12 to 18 months. The idea is that, even if one indicator is wrong, looking at several will give us a much better idea of what to expect.

I’m reading a very good book by investor Howard Marks titled The Most Important Thing. I’ll write a full review later, but today I want to focus on one of the book’s key points: the importance of second-order thinking.

As expected, today’s economic headlines revolve around the Fed’s meeting and news conference—specifically, the conspicuous absence of the word “patient” from the minutes. Chairwoman Janet Yellen was at pains to point out that removing “patient” didn’t mean the Fed would be impatient. Stirring stuff.

One of my particular interests in investing is how to make better decisions. I’ve written before about biases and problems we face, and much of the current research is in fields such as behavioral finance, with a focus on how to avoid mistakes that seem to be hardwired into our brains.

We talked the other day about slow failure in investing, when a portfolio simply can’t generate the expected returns over time. Although investors may do well on average, the mismatch between expected returns and actual results can spell failure for some who are in the market at a poor time.

Once again, we’ve hit the federal government’s borrowing limit. Having maxed out its credit card with the bond markets, the U.S. government is now pursuing the “usual emergency measures” while waiting for Congress to approve an increase in the debt limit.

We’ll probably be hearing about this, at high volume, for quite a while—and, based on past experience, right up until the last minute—so it’s worth understanding what is likely to happen.

Yesterday, we talked about the two kinds of investing failure: slow failure, where returns over time are too low to meet goals, and fast failure, which involves a sudden drawdown or loss. We’ll focus today on slow failure, as it’s the more insidious risk (and one that most people don’t think about in sufficient depth).

As I mentioned yesterday, investment risk is often measured against the investments themselves, and for good reason. Too often, though, these measures don’t really capture the risk that individual investors face.

Today, we’ll talk about what risk really is, in an individual context, and start to think about what that means for measuring risk and constructing portfolios to avoid it.