Everyone has a different appetite for risk. Some people like to chase those high growth companies that have chances of doubling in a year or two, while others would likely never sleep at night while three out of 10 of its investments destroy the market while the other 7 crash & burn. If you are one of those investors that don't have the sensibility to invest in those higher risk/higher reward type of companies, that's ok, there are plenty of lower risk companies that can generate good returns over time.
One ratio to measure the risk compared to the market is the beta ratio. A ratio under one shows us that the unique stock moves less than the overall market while a ratio far above one indicates that the stock is more volatile than the market.
If you look for more stability of your portfolio, you should look at low beta stocks. Mostly, you need to give up some of your return or dividend yield due to the higher safeness. But only sometimes.
Attached you can find a couple of stocks with the lowest beta ratio on the market while paying the highest available yields in their field. I've only included stocks with a market cap of more than 2 billion.
These are the results...
