Technical paper
Minimising extremes
Portfolio diversification often breaks down in stressed market environments, but the co-movement of asset prices in a tail risk regime may be modelled using a coefficient of tail dependence. Here, Yannick Malevergne and Didier Sornette show how such…
A joint state-space model for spot and futures power
Portfolio-wide risk management requires a model that accounts correctly for correlations between the spot asset and various futures products. Kjetil Kåresen and Egil Husby discuss a joint multi-factor model for power spot and futures prices and show how…
Portfolio allocation to corporate bonds with correlated defaults
This article deals with the problem of optimal allocation of capital to corporate bonds in fixed income portfolios when there is the possibility ofcorrelated defaults. Under fairly general assumptions for the distribution of thetotal net assets of a set…
Fallacies about the effects of market risk management systems
This paper takes another look at allegations that risk management systems have contributed to increased volatility in financial markets, with the particular example of the summer of 1998. The paper also provides new evidence on the potential effect of…
Avoiding pro-cyclicality
David Cosandey and Urs Wolf argue that, for small to medium-sized enterprises, Basel II is pro-cyclical because of a double-counting of the risks. They present two main directions for possible capital rules that would circumvent the pro-cyclicality…
A bootstrap back-test
Back-testing
Copula vulnerability
Counterparty credit risk
Reconstructing volatility
Options on stock baskets have become a mainstay of the equity derivatives business, but pricing and hedging of such products is highly sensitive to implied volatility and correlation assumptions. Here, Marco Avellaneda, Dash Boyer-Olson, Jérôme Busca and…
Reconstructing volatility
Equity derivatives
Estimating oil price volatility: a Garch model
Nikolai Sidorenko, Michael Baron and Michael Rosenberg present a general framework for modelling energy price volatility. These models explain the volatility persistence and clustering present in many commodity prices. In addition, they can incorporate…
Credit risk measurement of securitisation structures
Peter-Paul Hoogbruin, Harmenjan Sijtsma and Viktor Tchistiakov of ING Group Credit Risk Management present a framework for valuing securitisation tranches from an investor’s perspective.
Risk and reward at the speed of light: a new electricity price model
Samuel Bodily and Michel Del Buono propose a new electricity price model. The mean-reverting proportional volatility model matches important characteristics of power price dynamics where others, such as geometric Brownian motion, fall short
Component proponents
Principal component analysis is a widely used technique in finance but can be problematic when different data sets are grouped together. Christophe Pérignon and Christophe Villa show how to resolve this problem using a technique from biology called…
Finessing fixed dividends
Equity options
Assets with jumps
Option pricing