Experts say that the younger you are — or the further from your investment goals — the more risk you can afford to take. But what if the experts have got it wrong?

The traditional theory is that, with decades until retirement, you can ramp up the risk because you have enough time to ride out any ups and downs in performance. The stock market always tends to recover eventually, even from the worst of crashes. Meanwhile, older investors, who might want to access their money in six months or a year, can not afford any dips in the value of their pot, so should not take the risk.

I’m not sure this advice stacks up.

For starters if you only have a small amount invested (which is likely when you are just starting out) then losing any is incredibly painful. A bad experience could easily put a new investor off for life.

But more than that, there seems to be little sense in telling someone to take the most risk at the start of their investment journey when their knowledge is likely to be lacking and they probably do not have the time to dedicate to running a complicated investment portfolio.

Indiscriminately telling young and new investors to pile into risky assets is a bit like giving someone Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca to play in their first piano lesson. Sure there is a tiny chance they could master it the first time but most likely it will be a bit of a mess. It is better to build up to these things slowly and over time.

At the other end of the spectrum, older investors are told to steer away from anything risky precisely at a stage in life when they may have more knowledge about investing and more time (if they have retired or moved to part-time work) to manage their portfolio. To return to my musical analogy, it is like telling a concert pianist to stick to When the Saints Go Marching In just because they are in their sixties.

So under the traditional advice, risk is negatively correlated to age, ie risk goes down as age goes up. On a chart, your risk level would look like a line sloping diagonally downwards (the blue line on the graph below).

I followed this advice when I started investing. Perhaps my riskiest choice was an investment trust that focused on so-called frontier markets (countries such as Jordan and Kuwait, not yet developed enough to be classed as an emerging market). The investment case seemed compelling but I didn’t fully appreciate how illiquid and volatile some of the stocks it held would be. I sold after about four years having lost some money and gained some experience. In hindsight I should have just put my money in a tracker fund.

So what if we have been looking at this all wrong. Instead, maybe we should be aiming for a bell curve (the yellow line), where you begin more cautiously and increase risk as you gain knowledge, confidence and wealth before reducing it (but not getting rid of it entirely) as you approach retirement.

How would I put that into practice? For a young investor I would suggest a cheap ready-made portfolio is a good starting point. These are offered by most of the big investment platforms. You choose the level of risk you want to take then select a ready-made portfolio made up of different tracker funds, designed to meet that risk level. It will spread your money across a range of assets such as equities, bonds and property, which should mean you do not suffer any drastic dips. Set up a direct debit for a small amount you can afford — say, £50 a month — and this will set you on your way.

I am in my mid-thirties so, according to my theory, this is the point to start ramping up the risk. My portfolio is entirely invested in equities (the shares of companies listed on the stock market), so that’s a good start. But having most of my money in a well-diversified global tracker fund feels a bit vanilla.

I also hold a couple of investment trusts — one focuses on Asia and the other specifically on India — but there is probably room for one or two more. Still, I don’t want to add dozens of risky funds to my portfolio just for the sake of it and I probably wouldn’t pick a frontier markets fund again.

At some point in the future, I will add some bonds into the mix. These tend to move in the opposite direction to equities so can provide some ballast to a portfolio. Bonds can be a great option in retirement because they pay a regular income but they still work for younger investors because you can choose to reinvest that income to boost your returns.

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Traditional investing advice dictates that you should be well out of the stock market by the time you retire because you do not want to risk your savings. But maybe I’ll buck the trend: hopefully, I will have decades of investing experience by then and more time on my hands, so this could be when I become a proper hobbyist investor and start choosing individual shares.

Ignore the experts when it comes to risk. It is not a tick-box exercise and there is far more to consider than just your age. Be honest about your knowledge level and experience, as well as how much time and effort you are willing to put into your portfolio. Your bell curve may be steeper or shallower than mine, but it should not be dictated by your next birthday.