Managing Risk

Systemic financial crises arise when vulnerable financial systems meet adverse shocks. A systemic risk indicator tracks the vulnerability rather than the shocks (which are...

Estimating portfolio risk in extreme situations means answering two questions: First, has the market entered an extreme state? Second, how are returns likely to...

The business of algorithmic trading strategies creates incentives for model overfitting and backtest embellishment: researchers must pass Sharpe ratio thresholds for their strategies to...

Containment of drawdowns and optimization of performance ratios for multi-asset portfolios is critical for trading strategies. Alas, short data series or structural changes often...

The volatility risk premium compensates investors for taking volatility risk. Conceptually it is based on the difference between options-implied and expected realized volatility. In...

Public institutions have developed a wide range of methods to track systemic financial risk. What most of them have in common is reliance on...

The average annualized return of local-currency index futures for 25 international markets has been 6% with a standard deviation of just under 20%. All...

The statistical term ‘fat tails’ refers to probability distributions with relatively high probability of extreme outcomes. Fat tails also imply strong influence of extreme...

In normal financial runs lenders want their money back. In collateral runs borrowers want their collateral back. In today’s highly collateralized financial system the...

Interest rate swaps trade duration risk across developed and emerging markets. Since 2000 fixed rate receivers have posted positive returns in 26 of 27...