Market risk management is one of the key factors to success in managing financial institutions. Underestimated risk can have desastrous consequences for individual companies and even whole economies, not least as could be seen during the recent crises. Overestimated risk, on the other side, may...

In almost every financial market crisis we can observe widening credit spreads, especially in the last years during the subprime and sovereign debt crisis. But what exactly drives the credit spread? This paper will outline static components, i.e. default risk, liquidity, risk and the relative...

Trading and investment strategies play an essential part in better understanding fixed income markets. Over-the-counter markets and thousands of different outstanding bonds increase the difficulties to identify adequate comparison methods. Market participants and their practices differ widely...

Most traditional Value at Risk models neglect market liquidity risk and hence only consider the market price risk (i.e. risk associated with holding a certain position). In order to fully capture the market risk associated to holding and trading a position, we first define market liquidity risk,...

The current financial market crisis has impressively demonstrated the importance of aneffective credit risk management for financial institutions. At the same time, the use and thevaluation of credit derivatives has been widely criticised as a result of the crisis. Over the pastdecade, credit...

Credit risk measurement and management become more important in all financial institutions in the light of the current financial crisis and the global recession. This particularly applies to most of the complex structured financing forms whose risk cannot be quantified with com-mon rating...

In 2004 the Basel Committee published an extensive revision of the capital charges whichcreates more risk sensitive capital requirements for banks. The New Accord called “InternationalConvergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standard” provides in its first pillarfor a finer measurement...

Due to a fast market development in volume and innovation on the structured products (cer-tificates) side, critics are finding fault regarding a lack in transparency and comparability. However, certificates can provide characteristics for every market scenario as its explicit strength.The aim of...

Within the last decade, credit risk management of financial institutions has been subject to major changes due to the development of the credit derivatives market. In the past, financial institutions merely had the possibility to manage their credit portfolio by either approving or refusing a...

Investment decisions of cooperative banks are very restricted to their risk capacity. A well defined and organised Risk Management Process supports those investment activities and assists to achieve a balanced situation between risk and return.Several ways can be chosen to allocate risk capital....