Market risk overview
- Market risk refers to the loss that you can suffer due to adverse movements in equity, currency, interest rate and commodity markets
- Currency exposure consists of transaction, translation, and economic exposure
- Interest rate exposure is measured using PVBP, duration and convexity
- Equity exposure consists of unsystematic risk that is diversifiable, and systematic risk that cannot be diversified
- Systematic risk is measured using beta
- Commodity exposure depends on a large number of drivers as commodities are susceptible to several supply-side constraints such as droughts, wars, etc
- Traditional techniques of market risk management involve measures such as matching revenues to expenses and assets to liabilities, maintaining large inventories and cash position, and diversification
- Traditional hedges work best against competitive exposures that do not have a direct cash flow impact
- Derivatives hedges perform best when the underlying cash flows are known precisely
- A company's financial risk management policy can vary between no hedging, passive hedging and active hedging
- Although some fundamental theories predict that risk management cannot add any shareholder value, in reality there are instances where it can
Introduction to Credit Risk
- Credit risk is the risk of a loss due to a debtor's inability or unwillingness to meet its obligations
- Credit risk is a function of the amount at risk, the probability of default, and the recovery rate
- The stages of credit deterioration are: yield spread widening, credit downgrade, default, bankruptcy, receivership
- Various creditors, such as banks, bondholders, and trade creditors, have different sensitivities to the different stages in the credit deterioration process
Value at Risk (CFA Level III Suggested Reading)
- VaR refers to a family of sophisticated quantitative techniques for measuring and reporting market risk
- VaR presents risk in the form of a worst-case loss over a certain time period, given a certain level of confidence
- Since it is impossible to predict the future, the VaR can only be estimated and not calculated exactly
- The VaR of a portfolio that contains no options can be calculated using a parametric approach and VaR of a portfolio is a function of the VaRs of individual securities in the portfolio and the correlation between them
- The calculation of non-linear VaR becomes necessary when a portfolio contains a substantial component of options and complex securities
- The three methods of doing so are Structured Monte Carlo (SMC), historical simulation and stress testing
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