Extreme Financial Risks


Book Description

"Clearly elucidates extreme financial risks associated with rare events such as financial crashes. The highlight of the book is the delineation of various copulas in conjunction with financial dependences among different assets of a portfolio. In particular, the insightful discussion on quadrant and orthant dependences casts new light on the connection between marginal models and financial dependence...brings a vivid portrayal of the subject." -- MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS




Extreme Financial Risks And Asset Allocation


Book Description

Each financial crisis calls for — by its novelty and the mechanisms it shares with preceding crises — appropriate means to analyze financial risks. In Extreme Financial Risks and Asset Allocation, the authors present in an accessible and timely manner the concepts, methods, and techniques that are essential for an understanding of these risks in an environment where asset prices are subject to sudden, rough, and unpredictable changes. These phenomena, mathematically known as “jumps”, play an important role in practice. Their quantitative treatment is generally tricky and is sparsely tackled in similar books. One of the main appeals of this book lies in its approachable and concise presentation of the ad hoc mathematical tools without sacrificing the necessary rigor and precision.This book contains theories and methods which are usually found in highly technical mathematics books or in scattered, often very recent, research articles. It is a remarkable pedagogical work that makes these difficult results accessible to a large readership. Researchers, Masters and PhD students, and financial engineers alike will find this book highly useful.




Asset and Risk Management


Book Description

The aim of this book is to study three essential components of modern finance – Risk Management, Asset Management and Asset and Liability Management, as well as the links that bind them together. It is divided into five parts: Part I sets out the financial and regulatory contexts that explain the rapid development of these three areas during the last few years and shows the ways in which the Risk Management function has developed recently in financial institutions. Part II is dedicated to the underlying theories of Asset Management and deals in depth with evaluation of financial assets and with theories relating to equities, bonds and options. Part III deals with a central theory of Risk Management, the general theory of Value at Risk or VaR, its estimation techniques and the setting up of the methodology. Part IV is the point at which Asset Management and Risk Management meet. It deals with Portfolio Risk Management (the application of risk management methods to private asset management), with an adaptation of Sharpe’s simple index method and the EGP method to suit VaR and application of the APT method to investment funds in terms of behavioural analysis. Part V is the point at which Risk Management and Asset and Liability Management (ALM) meet, and touches on techniques for measuring structural risks within the on and off balance sheet. The book is aimed both at financial professionals and at students whose studies contain a financial aspect. "Esch, Kieffer and Lopez have provided us with a comprehensive and well written treatise on risk. This is a must read, must keep volume for all those who need or aspire to a professional understanding of risk and its management." —Harry M Markowitz, San Diego, USA




Financial Risk Modelling and Portfolio Optimization with R


Book Description

Financial Risk Modelling and Portfolio Optimization with R, 2nd Edition Bernhard Pfaff, Invesco Global Asset Allocation, Germany A must have text for risk modelling and portfolio optimization using R. This book introduces the latest techniques advocated for measuring financial market risk and portfolio optimization, and provides a plethora of R code examples that enable the reader to replicate the results featured throughout the book. This edition has been extensively revised to include new topics on risk surfaces and probabilistic utility optimization as well as an extended introduction to R language. Financial Risk Modelling and Portfolio Optimization with R: Demonstrates techniques in modelling financial risks and applying portfolio optimization techniques as well as recent advances in the field. Introduces stylized facts, loss function and risk measures, conditional and unconditional modelling of risk; extreme value theory, generalized hyperbolic distribution, volatility modelling and concepts for capturing dependencies. Explores portfolio risk concepts and optimization with risk constraints. Is accompanied by a supporting website featuring examples and case studies in R. Includes updated list of R packages for enabling the reader to replicate the results in the book. Graduate and postgraduate students in finance, economics, risk management as well as practitioners in finance and portfolio optimization will find this book beneficial. It also serves well as an accompanying text in computer-lab classes and is therefore suitable for self-study.




Handbook of Financial Risk Management


Book Description

Developed over 20 years of teaching academic courses, the Handbook of Financial Risk Management can be divided into two main parts: risk management in the financial sector; and a discussion of the mathematical and statistical tools used in risk management. This comprehensive text offers readers the chance to develop a sound understanding of financial products and the mathematical models that drive them, exploring in detail where the risks are and how to manage them. Key Features: Written by an author with both theoretical and applied experience Ideal resource for students pursuing a master’s degree in finance who want to learn risk management Comprehensive coverage of the key topics in financial risk management Contains 114 exercises, with solutions provided online at www.crcpress.com/9781138501874




Extreme Events in Finance


Book Description

A guide to the growing importance of extreme value risk theory, methods, and applications in the financial sector Presenting a uniquely accessible guide, Extreme Events in Finance: A Handbook of Extreme Value Theory and Its Applications features a combination of the theory, methods, and applications of extreme value theory (EVT) in finance and a practical understanding of market behavior including both ordinary and extraordinary conditions. Beginning with a fascinating history of EVTs and financial modeling, the handbook introduces the historical implications that resulted in the applications and then clearly examines the fundamental results of EVT in finance. After dealing with these theoretical results, the handbook focuses on the EVT methods critical for data analysis. Finally, the handbook features the practical applications and techniques and how these can be implemented in financial markets. Extreme Events in Finance: A Handbook of Extreme Value Theory and Its Applications includes: Over 40 contributions from international experts in the areas of finance, statistics, economics, business, insurance, and risk management Topical discussions on univariate and multivariate case extremes as well as regulation in financial markets Extensive references in order to provide readers with resources for further study Discussions on using R packages to compute the value of risk and related quantities The book is a valuable reference for practitioners in financial markets such as financial institutions, investment funds, and corporate treasuries, financial engineers, quantitative analysts, regulators, risk managers, large-scale consultancy groups, and insurers. Extreme Events in Finance: A Handbook of Extreme Value Theory and Its Applications is also a useful textbook for postgraduate courses on the methodology of EVTs in finance.




Portfolio Risk Analysis


Book Description

Portfolio risk forecasting has been and continues to be an active research field for both academics and practitioners. Almost all institutional investment management firms use quantitative models for their portfolio forecasting, and researchers have explored models' econometric foundations, relative performance, and implications for capital market behavior and asset pricing equilibrium. Portfolio Risk Analysis provides an insightful and thorough overview of financial risk modeling, with an emphasis on practical applications, empirical reality, and historical perspective. Beginning with mean-variance analysis and the capital asset pricing model, the authors give a comprehensive and detailed account of factor models, which are the key to successful risk analysis in every economic climate. Topics range from the relative merits of fundamental, statistical, and macroeconomic models, to GARCH and other time series models, to the properties of the VIX volatility index. The book covers both mainstream and alternative asset classes, and includes in-depth treatments of model integration and evaluation. Credit and liquidity risk and the uncertainty of extreme events are examined in an intuitive and rigorous way. An extensive literature review accompanies each topic. The authors complement basic modeling techniques with references to applications, empirical studies, and advanced mathematical texts. This book is essential for financial practitioners, researchers, scholars, and students who want to understand the nature of financial markets or work toward improving them.







Adaptive Asset Allocation


Book Description

Build an agile, responsive portfolio with a new approach to global asset allocation Adaptive Asset Allocation is a no-nonsense how-to guide for dynamic portfolio management. Written by the team behind Gestaltu.com, this book walks you through a uniquely objective and unbiased investment philosophy and provides clear guidelines for execution. From foundational concepts and timing to forecasting and portfolio optimization, this book shares insightful perspective on portfolio adaptation that can improve any investment strategy. Accessible explanations of both classical and contemporary research support the methodologies presented, bolstered by the authors' own capstone case study showing the direct impact of this approach on the individual investor. Financial advisors are competing in an increasingly commoditized environment, with the added burden of two substantial bear markets in the last 15 years. This book presents a framework that addresses the major challenges both advisors and investors face, emphasizing the importance of an agile, globally-diversified portfolio. Drill down to the most important concepts in wealth management Optimize portfolio performance with careful timing of savings and withdrawals Forecast returns 80% more accurately than assuming long-term averages Adopt an investment framework for stability, growth, and maximum income An optimized portfolio must be structured in a way that allows quick response to changes in asset class risks and relationships, and the flexibility to continually adapt to market changes. To execute such an ambitious strategy, it is essential to have a strong grasp of foundational wealth management concepts, a reliable system of forecasting, and a clear understanding of the merits of individual investment methods. Adaptive Asset Allocation provides critical background information alongside a streamlined framework for improving portfolio performance.




Strategic Asset Allocation


Book Description

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.