Blog

Managing Risk with Options

Our partner, TraderMinute.com launched its first public $100K challenge in March of 2013. The Challenge is a unique concept where they try to turn $3,000 into $100,000 in only 4 months! They use a live brokerage account and allow active subscribers to follow each trade in real time via email, text, and live video.  The question is: Have they ever turned $3k into $100k? Yes: They have accomplished this feat twice with other success of 47K, 19K, 21K, 4K, and 4 losses.

The Basel Committee, which creates regulations for banks, has published a set of principles regarding effective risk data aggregation and risk reporting, which will provide a fantastic business case for risk professionals to improve their risk frameworks. I’ve included highlights below, but you can take a look at the full report here.

The principles for effective risk data aggregation and risk reporting will be mandatory for globally systemically important banks (G-SIBs) from 2016, and the Basel

L’exercice 2013 de preparation a Solvabilite II, something close to a French Solvency II dry run scheduled for September 2013, gives French insurers the chance to immediately take advantage of the lessons learned by other European insurers that raced to be ahead of the Solvency II curve. Many of the mid-size and small French mutual insurers (les mutuelles) held back from initiating projects and they can now draw on the best practices that have come out of early adopter projects across Europe fro

The new category of domestic systemically important banks will increase the data management and disclosure burden on qualifying institutions, at a time when many are already feeling the strain.

Banks that escaped classification as G-SIFIs in 2011 may have breathed a sigh of relief at the time, but for many, that relief will have been short-lived. In October last year, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) set out its proposed framework for an additional category of systemically import

I was recently asked by a young risk professional for recommendations on good books on risk.  Here is my short list:

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

Interview with Paul Emerson, Vice President, Asset Allocation, Risk Management at AllianceBernstein, L.P.

Operational risk management has moved beyond the simple calculation of capital requirements. Today operational risk managers need to have a proactive, holistic approach to operational risk to ensure they maintain their organizations’ profitability and reputation. Recent financial scandals have shown that operational risk could bring tremendous losses and not every firm is capable of recoverin

The energy market is becoming increasingly competitive and volatile. The key to maintaining a competitive advantage is to develop effective hedging strategies and minimize risk exposure. With the new regulations introduced by the Dodd Frank Act, energy companies have seen a big change in their approach to hedging and they are on the look-out for establishing effective hedging strategies to value their assets and optimize their revenue.

Stephen Wemple, Vice President, Regulatory Affairs, Con Ediso

Operational risk management has evolved from the simple calculation of capital requirements to a proactive, holistic approach. This new strategy ensures that operational risk managers maintain their organizations’ profitability and brand reputation. In fact, recent financial scandals revealed that operational risk can result in incredible losses that many organizations can sometimes never fully recover from.

According to Ger Jan Meijer, Director of Operational Risk Management for Citco Fund Servi

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:

• B

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