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Quantopian, a start-up from Boston, wants to help ambitious traders disprove what many people have accepted for quite a while now – that while an individuals may get lucky from time to time, they cannot beat the market over a long period of time.

The company provides a service that allows individual traders to write their own trading algorithms and use them however they like. In this way, more individual traders could get involved in algorithmic trading without the help of a larger entity.

Found

In this posting we take a look at Nassim Taleb's video and show a working example of the Sigmoid function in R Project.

Many risk practitioners approach the quantification of risk by convoluting frequency and magnitude curves.

The Sigmoid concept which is at the heart of Antifragile, looks at risk differently. It breaks up a system into various states of Fragile and Robust, then brings them back together as a single function of risk.

More can be found here [ LINK ]

According to a report published by Technology Business Research last week, IT investment among North American banks is on the rise, with one of the main drivers for this being data management. This echoes findings of research SunGard recently conducted into risk management trends and priorities among more than 750 of our banking customers in 60 countries. Over 50% of respondents confirmed that their IT budgets for risk management has increased or remained stable since 2012. In the US, 65% of ban

Ask most financial institutions about onboarding new reconciliations and the response you’ll get is one big manual headache. Luckily the status quo with lengthy delays and manual processing issues is undergoing a shakeup. A recent benchmark survey with Aite Group reviews the existing onboarding challenges and highlights room for improvement.

Onboarding a new reconciliation has a complex lifecycle. Typically, it will include defining business needs and technical requirements, design, configuration

Ten years ago nine out of ten CFOs I was consulting to would tell me their CEO was too busy to meet to discuss the risk program under development.  The CFO was tasked with the job and we should just get on with it.  Today it is less likely to be a problem to meet with the CEO on risk, however, getting to the Board still seems to have its challenges for many risk professionals.  My experience is that “risk appetite” is one of the best tools to engage the Board.  This is how you can make it work:

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The reliance on staff to deal with manual reconciliations and multiple systems is about to reach its tipping point. With headcount reduction and cost cutting, firms are under increasing pressure to automate their reconciliation processes. This combined with key-person risk where recs processes are known to an individual or a small contingent leads to a significant source of operational risk.  In the second part of the series from the Aite Group benchmark survey, these challenges are put under th

The role of the enterprise risk manager has finally become clear: close the gap between strategic level risks and the operational risks faced at the activity level. Despite being a relatively new corporate discipline, expectations for ERM value are already very high. A recent poll shows us why corporations are desperate for ERM managers to be successful.

The poll, conducted by Harris Interactive of 23,000 corporate full-time employees within key industries and in key functional areas¹ highlights

Complimentary Webinar

Bringing IT and Business Together for
Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

Tuesday, 6th August, 3PM (AEST)
Register Here Now

Please join me as I conduct a Complimentary Webinar on Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and the links between IT and Business Managers.

To present this webinar, I have teamed up with Always Up IT, which is a Microsoft Gold Partner and EMC Premier Partner and assists businesses and government departments with technology needs.

This free webinar will help yo

A study published last week sponsored by Tripwire and conducted by the Ponemon Institute found that while over 80% of security and risk professionals consider their organization's commitment to risk-based security management significant, less than 30% had a formal risk management strategy in place.

Why does such a large gap continue to exist, even as the evidence piles up that organizations with a mature risk framework are better performing and more prepared for an uncertain future?

One hurdle tha

Today’s banking industry must deal with an evolving regulatory landscape by developing new and innovative strategies for acquiring and optimizing capital. Banks must find a new way to raise capital, maintain a functional capital structure, and continue providing the products and services their customers demand while staying profitable. The new deadline for implementing the Basel III capital requirements makes capital management the most important issue for banks today.

Bogie Ozdemir, Vice Preside

LONDON – Britain legalised gay marriage on Wednesday after Queen Elizabeth II gave her royal assent to a bill approved by lawmakers, the culture ministry said.

Same-sex couples will be able to marry from next year after Prime Minister David Cameron pushed the legislation through against the will of dozens of his own Conservative lawmakers.

Members of parliament cheered as they were told the historic bill, pushed through by Prime Minister David Cameron despite opposition within his own party, had p

Ishikawa Diagrams are often used to investigate how different risk factors can combine together to cause a specific outcome and are common techniques for quality control or defect inquires. The diagrams are quite popular because they are easy to understand and they can also be appraised by technical or non-technical managers alike.

Ishikawa Diagrams explained and demonstrated using R-Project in a couple of minutes.

More can be found here [ LINK ]

Risk Leadership: Qualified Risk Director - What Does It Take?

The Qualified Risk Directors Governance Council of the Directors and Chief Risk Officers Group (“the DCRO”) based in the US with members from “over 100 countries” has recently published Qualified Risk Director Guidelines.  The guidelines outline the skills and experience Boards and shareholder groups should be looking for when appointing Board members to boost oversight of Risk Management.

The guidelines state that Risk Directors shoul

Fifteen of the world’s top risk managers met recently at the 2013 RIMS Risk Summit. When the topic of reputational risk arose, the group struggled to develop a concrete value proposition, but unanimously agreed that no ERM assessment that failed to tackle reputation risk would be deemed complete by leadership.

Their recognition calls attention to one of the biggest hurdles confronted by risk managers in all industries when faced with high level risks deemed critical by the board or executive lead

A recent survey carried out by KPMG and the Economist Intelligence Unit finds that 81% of risk managers and executives fail to effectively capture risk appetite in their business models, what can we do?

In this blog posting I have linked to the new KPMG Expectations of Risk Management survey and included an infographic for fixing risk appetite.

More can be found here [ LINK ]

The Biggest Risks in an Internal Audit May Be the Issues You Miss Richard Chambers, CIA, CGAP, CCSA, CRMA, shares his personal reflections and insights on the internal audit profession. For many years, I taught accounting courses during the evenings at a local university.

I would often tell my students, “The only stupid question is the one that is never asked — unless the question is, 'Would you postpone the next exam?'” My years as a college instructor coincided with the early years of my inte

An interesting question was sent to me only the other day on Supply Chain Risk Management.

"Martin, do you have any specific risk frameworks or do you know of any good case studies that have been published on Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM)?".

Supply Chain Risk Management is a complex and intertwined risk initiative to kick off and we have included a schematic which outlines some of the requirements that may need to be covered. We have also linked to an absolutely fantastic white paper that is

We recently worked with Aite Group on a benchmark survey exploring the reconciliation challenges facing financial services firms. The benchmark threw up a number of interesting findings around issues such as an over-reliance on manual processes, delays in onboarding and issues in handling non-standard and inter-system recs. In this first of a series of blogs on the benchmark findings, I will examine how a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach no longer fits the bill.

Many banks are trying to use yesterday