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Tail Risk
Tail risk, sometimes called "fat tail risk," is the financial risk of an asset or portfolio of assets moving more than three standard deviations from its current price, above the risk of a normal distribution. Tail risks include low-probability events arising at both ends of a normal distribution curve, also known as tail events. However, as investors are generally more concerned with unexpected losses rather than gains, a debate about tail risk is focused on the left tail. Prudent asset managers are typically cautious with the tail involving losses which could damage or ruin portfolios, and not the beneficial tail of outsized gains. The common technique of theorizing a normal distribution of price changes underestimates tail risk when market data exhibit fat tails, thus understating asset prices, stock returns and subsequent risk management strategies. Tail risk is sometimes defined less strictly: as merely the risk (or probability) of rare events. The arbitrary definition of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Financial Risk
Financial risk is any of various types of risk associated with financing, including financial transactions that include company loans in risk of default. Often it is understood to include only downside risk, meaning the potential for financial loss and uncertainty about its extent. A science has evolved around managing market and financial risk under the general title of modern portfolio theory initiated by Dr. Harry Markowitz in 1952 with his article, "Portfolio Selection". In modern portfolio theory, the variance (or standard deviation) of a portfolio is used as the definition of risk. Types According to Bender and Panz (2021), financial risks can be sorted into five different categories. In their study, they apply an algorithm-based framework and identify 193 single financial risk types, which are sorted into the five categories market risk, liquidity risk, credit risk, business risk and investment risk. Market risk The four standard market risk factors are equity ri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Black Swan Events
The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on an ancient saying that presumed black swans did not exist a saying that became reinterpreted to teach a different lesson after they were discovered in Australia. The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, starting in 2001, to explain: # The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology. # The non-computability of the probability of consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities). # The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and a rare event's massive role in historical affairs. Taleb's "black swan theory" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Counterparty Risk
A credit risk is risk of default on a debt that may arise from a borrower failing to make required payments. In the first resort, the risk is that of the lender and includes lost principal and interest, disruption to cash flows, and increased collection costs. The loss may be complete or partial. In an efficient market, higher levels of credit risk will be associated with higher borrowing costs. Because of this, measures of borrowing costs such as yield spreads can be used to infer credit risk levels based on assessments by market participants. Losses can arise in a number of circumstances, for example: * A consumer may fail to make a payment due on a mortgage loan, credit card, line of credit, or other loan. * A company is unable to repay asset-secured fixed or floating charge debt. * A business or consumer does not pay a trade invoice when due. * A business does not pay an employee's earned wages when due. * A business or government bond issuer does not make a payment on a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alpha (finance)
Alpha is a measure of the active return on an investment, the performance of that investment compared with a suitable market index. An alpha of 1% means the investment's return on investment over a selected period of time was 1% better than the market during that same period; a negative alpha means the investment underperformed the market. Alpha, along with beta, is one of two key coefficients in the capital asset pricing model used in modern portfolio theory and is closely related to other important quantities such as standard deviation, R-squared and the Sharpe ratio. In modern financial markets, where index funds are widely available for purchase, alpha is commonly used to judge the performance of mutual funds and similar investments. As these funds include various fees normally expressed in percent terms, the fund has to maintain an alpha greater than its fees in order to provide positive gains compared with an index fund. Historically, the vast majority of traditional funds h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Financial Crisis Of 2007–2008
Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of financial economics bridges the two). Finance activities take place in financial systems at various scopes, thus the field can be roughly divided into personal, corporate, and public finance. In a financial system, assets are bought, sold, or traded as financial instruments, such as currencies, loans, bonds, shares, stocks, options, futures, etc. Assets can also be banked, invested, and insured to maximize value and minimize loss. In practice, risks are always present in any financial action and entities. A broad range of subfields within finance exist due to its wide scope. Asset, money, risk and investment management aim to maximize value and minimize volatility. Financial analysis is viability, stability, and profitability a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Value At Risk
Value at risk (VaR) is a measure of the risk of loss for investments. It estimates how much a set of investments might lose (with a given probability), given normal market conditions, in a set time period such as a day. VaR is typically used by firms and regulators in the financial industry to gauge the amount of assets needed to cover possible losses. For a given portfolio, time horizon, and probability ''p'', the ''p'' VaR can be defined informally as the maximum possible loss during that time after excluding all worse outcomes whose combined probability is at most ''p''. This assumes mark-to-market pricing, and no trading in the portfolio. For example, if a portfolio of stocks has a one-day 95% VaR of $1 million, that means that there is a 0.05 probability that the portfolio will fall in value by more than $1 million over a one-day period if there is no trading. Informally, a loss of $1 million or more on this portfolio is expected on 1 day out of 20 days (because of 5% proba ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conditional Value-at-Risk
Expected shortfall (ES) is a risk measure—a concept used in the field of financial risk measurement to evaluate the market risk or credit risk of a portfolio. The "expected shortfall at q% level" is the expected return on the portfolio in the worst q\% of cases. ES is an alternative to value at risk that is more sensitive to the shape of the tail of the loss distribution. Expected shortfall is also called conditional value at risk (CVaR), average value at risk (AVaR), expected tail loss (ETL), and superquantile. ES estimates the risk of an investment in a conservative way, focusing on the less profitable outcomes. For high values of q it ignores the most profitable but unlikely possibilities, while for small values of q it focuses on the worst losses. On the other hand, unlike the discounted maximum loss, even for lower values of q the expected shortfall does not consider only the single most catastrophic outcome. A value of q often used in practice is 5%. Expected shortfall is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bankruptcy Of Lehman Brothers
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, was the climax of the subprime mortgage crisis. After the financial services firm was notified of a pending credit downgrade due to its heavy position in subprime mortgages, the Federal Reserve summoned several banks to negotiate financing for its reorganization. These discussions failed, and Lehman filed a Chapter 11 petition that remains the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history, involving more than in assets. The bankruptcy triggered a 4.5% one-day drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, then the largest decline since the September 11, 2001, attacks. It signaled a limit to the government's ability to manage the crisis and prompted a general financial panic. Money market mutual funds, a key source of credit, saw mass withdrawal demands to avoid losses, and the interbank lending market tightened, threatening banks with imminent failure. The government and the Federal Reserve system responded with several emergency ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subprime Mortgage Crisis
The United States subprime mortgage crisis was a multinational financial crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2010 that contributed to the Financial crisis of 2007–2008, 2007–2008 global financial crisis. It was triggered by a large decline in US home prices after the collapse of a 2000s United States housing bubble, housing bubble, leading to Mortgage loan, mortgage delinquencies, foreclosures, and the devaluation of Mortgage-backed security, housing-related securities. Declines in residential investment preceded the Great Recession and were followed by reductions in household spending and then business investment. Spending reductions were more significant in areas with a combination of high household debt and larger housing price declines. The housing bubble preceding the crisis was financed with Mortgage-backed security, mortgage-backed securities (MBSes) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which initially offered higher interest rates (i.e. better returns) than go ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dot-com Bubble
The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Composite stock market index rose 400%, only to fall 78% from its peak by October 2002, giving up all its gains during the bubble. During the dot-com crash, many online shopping companies, such as Pets.com, Webvan, and Boo.com, as well as several communication companies, such as Worldcom, NorthPoint Communications, and Global Crossing, failed and shut down. Some companies that survived, such as Amazon, lost large portions of their market capitalization, with Cisco Systems alone losing 80% of its stock value. Background Historically, the dot-com boom can be seen as similar to a number of other technology-inspired booms of the past including railroads in the 1840s, automobiles in the early 20th century, radio in the 1920s, television in the 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Long-Term Capital Management
Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) was a highly-leveraged hedge fund. In 1998, it received a $3.6 billion bailout from a group of 14 banks, in a deal brokered and put together by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. LTCM was founded in 1994 by John Meriwether, the former vice-chairman and head of bond trading at Salomon Brothers. Members of LTCM's board of directors included Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who three years later in 1997 shared the Nobel Prize in Economics for having developed the Black–Scholes model of financial dynamics.''A financial History of the United States Volume II: 1970–2001'', Jerry W. Markham, Chapter 5: "Bank Consolidation", M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 2002 LTCM was initially successful, with annualized returns (after fees) of around 21% in its first year, 43% in its second year and 41% in its third year. However, in 1998 it lost $4.6 billion in less than four months due to a combination of high leverage and exposure to the 1997 Asian financi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1998 Russian Financial Crisis
The Russian financial crisis (also called the ruble crisis or the Russian flu) began in Russia on 17 August 1998. It resulted in the Russian government and the Russian Central Bank devaluing the ruble and defaulting on its debt. The crisis had severe impacts on the economies of many neighboring countries. Background and course of events The Russian economy had set up a path for improvement after the Soviet Union had split into different countries. Russia was supposed to provide assistance to the former Soviet states and, as a result, imported heavily from them. In Russia, foreign loans financed domestic investments. When it was unable to pay back those foreign borrowings, the ruble devalued. In mid-1997 Russia had finally found a way out of inflation. The economic supervisors were happy about inflation coming to a standstill. Then the crisis hit and supervisors had to implement a new policy. Both Russia and the countries that exported to it experienced fiscal deficits. The cou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
