Managing Model Risk: Part 3. Collective Hubris
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. – Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5. “We are building the language in which to discuss model risk,” said Boris Deychman, Director of Model, Market and Operational Risk Management at RBS Citizens Financial Group. He drew an analogy with the world of wine experts, who have developed specific vocabulary to talk about aroma and taste. “They don’t say just: this tastes like wine.” Deychman was the third and final speaker of a panel invited by the Global Association of Risk Professionals to discuss […]
Risk-Adjusted Performance Measurement. Part 1: Mind the Expectations
“The guiding principles for risk control,” said Carl Bacon, CIPM, Chairman of Statpro, and former Director of Risk Control and Performance at F&C Investment Management Ltd, “are integration and confidence in data.” Bacon was in Toronto on September 17, 2012 to deliver a one-day workshop on risk-adjusted performance measurement to about a dozen members of the CFA Society Toronto as part of the Society’s continuing education program. He is the author of Practical Portfolio Performance Measurement & Attribution, which went into its second edition in 2008. Performance measurement is the calculation of portfolio return for purposes of comparison against a […]
Uncontrolled Risk
Uncontrolled Risk: The Lessons of Lehman Brothers and How Systemic Risk Can Still Bring Down the World Financial System by Mark T. Williams 220 pp., not including 27 pp of Appendix, Notes, and Index (Reprinted from The Analyst, March 2011 issue.) On September 15, 2008, the 158-year-old investment bank, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy, thereby unleashing a horde of systemic risk effects that continue to bedevil the financial system. In this recently-published investigation into how the collapse of one iconic institution contaminated an entire sector, Mark T. Williams draws some sobering lessons. In the 1990s, author Mark T. Williams worked […]