What’s in a name? Help us find the right name for the new book on risk.

Help us find the right name for the new book on risk management Here is the background story. I have just sent in my manuscript for a text book on risk management to Palgrave Macmillan. Macmillan is likely to publish in the book by December 2013. The book is being positioned as a desk reference for practitioners [...]

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Risk Assessment – From risk exposure to impact.

Estimating Exposure and Impact – Emirates Airline Emirates airline is a leading Middle Eastern airline known for its commitment to redefining business travel and operating the largest business and first class transit lounges in the world at Dubai Airport. Emirates flies 40 million passengers a year and its last reported financial year (2012-2013) grossed just [...]

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The new text book on risk.

I owe all of you an apology. You must be wondering where in the world have we disappeared to. It’s one thing for me to wander off to Nairobi and not come back, it is a different story when the entire team pulls a disappearing act worthy of X files. Here is the story behind our absence [...]

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Nairobi National Park – Open Air Safari

Last week at a client conference on risk systems in Nairobi, the client recommended that I take half a day off in the morning and try out the open air safari. The safari guide would come pick me up from my hotel at 7 am, drive me down to the Nairobi National Park and drop [...]

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Bond Risk: Calculating Value at Risk (VaR) for Bonds

Bond Risk: Calculating Value at Risk (VaR) for Bonds. Here are two common challenges that come up when we apply risk management concepts to individual bonds and bond portfolios: a) How do you measure risk of a newly issued bond that has no history of trading prices b) How do you integrate the risk of a bond issued [...]

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About Finance Training Course.com – An overdue introduction

About Finance Training Course.com – our story Sometimes when you have been working on an idea for a decade and a half it is easy to assume that everyone loves it as much as you do. Or is aware of the back story. This morning two prospective customers asked me about who we really are and why [...]

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Yahoo-Tumblr Math?

Yahoo-Tumblr acquisition – How did the math work out?I think there are multiple methods at work here: a) Traffic Integration - What is Tumblr’s Traffic worth to Yahoo? What can Yahoo sell to these customers or sell these customers for? Over the next 5 years  how much revenue would this traffic add to Yahoo’s bottom line?  Read the [...]

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Calculating Value at Risk (VaR) with or without VCV matrix

Value at Risk – Calculating Portfolio VaR for multiple securities with & without VCV Matrix .In an earlier VCV Matrix post we had presented the theoretical proof of how the portfolio VaR obtained using the short cut weighted average return method produces the same result as would have been obtained if a detailed Variance Covariance [...]

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Nate Silver on Forecasting, Simulations, Probabilities & Improbable.

Nate Silver – Signal vs Noise. Book review Overconfidence regarding our prediction skills often leads to worse predictions in situations where there is a high level of uncertainty surrounding an event. In the book by Nate Silver “The signal and the noise – why so many predictions fail but some don’t”, uncertainty is represented by the [...]

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Deriving Factors for Table H, Table S and Table R(2) of the IRS Actuarial Tables used in the US

Table H Recently a visitor to FinanceTrainingCourse.com, who had seen our basic introductory course on developing commutation functions, requested us to recreate the commutation tables used by the IRS in the US, Table H. Table H contains commutations factors, at various interest rates, that are used in the valuation of annuities, life estates, and remainders.The tables contain [...]

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