Risk magazine/Technical paper
Mixed default modelling
Structural and reduced-form models are two well-established approaches to modelling afirm’s default risk. Here, Li Chen, Damir Filipovic/ and Vincent Poor develop a new default riskmodelling strategy based on combining these two frameworks in order to…
Incorporating policyholder expectations into ALM
European life insurers have recently improved their asset/liability management (ALM) skills.However, those efforts have been limited to the matching of guaranteed policyholder benefits.While bringing considerable insight, they also leave management with…
In the core of correlation
The single-factor Gaussian copula model has become a benchmark for the pricing and risk management of basket credit derivatives and synthetic CDO tranches. However, recent months have seen the development of a market for tranched synthetic indexes,…
Detecting market abuse
Financial regulators need a way to detect market abuse in real time. Marcello Minenna has developed such a procedure that can detect, for each quoted stock and on a daily basis, the presence of market abuse phenomena by means of a set of tripwires that…
Maximum drawdown
The maximum loss from a market peak to a market nadir, commonly called the maximum drawdown (MDD), measures how sustained one’s losses can be. Malik Magdon-Ismail and Amir Atiya present analytical results relating the MDD to the mean return and the…
Smile dynamics
Traditionally, smile models have been assessed according to how well they fit market option prices across strikes and maturities. However, the pricing of most recent exotic structures, such as reverse cliquets or Napoleons, is more dependent on the…
Correlating market models
While swaption prices theoretically contain information on interest rate correlation, Bruce Choy, Tim Dun and Erik Schlögl argue that, for any practical purpose, this information cannot be extracted. Care must therefore be taken when pricing correlation…
A measure of survival
Credit derivatives
Hedging of corporate pension liabilities
Bernd Scherer here proposes a normative theory of asset/liability management that views externally funded pension funds exclusively from a corporate finance point. Standard asset management solutions are derived after the corporate finance problem has…
Component proponents II
Christophe Pérignon and Christophe Villa propose a novel method of extracting the risk factors driving interest rates that allows both the covariance matrix of interest rates and the variances of the risk factors to vary through time. To illustrate the…
Local cross-entropy
One way of addressing the inconsistency between exchange-traded options prices and the Black-Scholes model is to attempt to find alternative risk-neutral distributions that are more consistent. However, non-uniqueness means an additional criterion is…
A credit loss control variable
Viktor Tchistiakov, Jeroen de Smet and Peter-Paul Hoogbruin explain and demonstrate how the efficiency of Monte Carlo simulation in valuing a portfolio of credit risky exposures is improved by the use of the Vasicek distribution as a control variable. An…
Arbitrage under power
When one knows the correct value of a tradable asset and the asset price diverges from that value, future convergence may present a good trading opportunity. However, the trader still has to decide when and how aggressively to open the position, and when…
Generalising universal performance measures
Performance and risk measurement are fundamental quantitative activities in finance, andnew ways of measuring them are always of interest. A recently proposed procedure is theuniversal performance measure. Theofanis Darsinos and Stephen Satchell show…
Correlated defaults: let’s go back to the data
Estimates of asset value correlation are a key element of Merton-style credit portfolio models. Many practitioners have access to asset value data for a large universe of listed firms, so estimation is within reach. Alan Pitts describes a statistical…
Smile at the uncertainty
Smile-consistent alternatives to the Black-Scholes model are often too cumbersome to be used for large portfolios of exotic options. Damiano Brigo, Fabio Mercurio and Francesco Rapisarda propose an intuitive stochastic volatility model that is easy to…
An arbitrage-free interpolation of volatilities
Nabil Kahalé describes a new construction of an implied volatilities surface from a discrete set of implied volatilities that is arbitrage-free and satisfies some smoothness conditions. His method provides an excellent fit to the smile of the local…
Practical relative-value volatility trading
The rapid growth of fixed-income hedge funds has resulted in increased interest in identifying relative-value trade opportunities. Here, the author presents a consistent framework for finding value within interest rate options markets.
Cross-market valuation
This article takes the guesswork out of what credit margin to use when valuing credit-risky derivatives, and also sheds light on how relative value trading and capital structure arbitrage may be analysed quantitatively.
PD estimates for Basel II
One of the main issues banks will have to face to comply with the new Basel II internal ratings-based approach is to prove that the long-run average probabilities of default they assign to their clients, which will be used as the basis for regulatory…
Unifying volatility models
This article introduces a method for building analytically tractable option pricing models that combine state-dependent volatility, stochastic volatility and jumps. The eigenfunction expansion method is used to add jumps and stochastic volatility to…
Multi-factor adjustment
The author presents an analytical method for calculating portfolio value-at-risk and expected shortfall in the multi-factor Merton framework. This method is essentially an extension of the granularity adjustment technique to a new dimension.