Description: This article provides a retrospective on investment risk management while highlighting actuarial tools used by portfolio risk managers.

Description: The article makes reference to how the intervention by government agencies and institutions into the financial marketplace are creating distortions. This artificial tampering into market mechanisms will likely result in major financial dislocations down the road as natural economic forces (coined by the term "invisible hand") eventually are allowed to come into play.

Description: Summarizes the state of US government balance sheet and defends the view that inflation will not rise sharply in the next few years.

Description: This article focuses on one fundamental modeling assumption — the choice of a benchmark rate or risk-free rate. The author looks at this bond market assumption as a case study of how one needs to monitor fundamental market changes for their impact on assumptions.

Description: This article discusses capital market cycles, specifically considering whether or not 2008 was a good time to buy. It concludes that “stocks have likely only recently entered the buying opportunity range on an aggregate basis. However, from a psychological and risk management perspective, we should strongly consider that stock prices will revert beyond the mean for many years, perhaps even decades, before they get better.”

Description: This articles explores the notion of whether the old rules and paradigms of investment strategy and caution may no longer be applicable in today’s financial environment, because things were “different this time.”

Description: “What is the likelihood of market crashes? This article seeks to provide an answer to this and related questions by focusing mainly on the crash of October 1987. Specifically, we shall seek answers to three questions: 1. Given the history of market returns, was the crash of ‘87 unusual? 2. How do conditional variance models such as GARCH behave around periods of extreme moves in the market? 3. What is the impact of the crash on backtesting and performance evaluation?” Editor’s Note: The following article originally appeared in the Winter 1998 issue of The BARRA Newsletter, Horizon, and is reprinted here with permission.

Description: If has been noted that the turnover of many investment funds has been quite high in recent years relative to history and very high in absolute terms. There have been fundamental changes in the marketplace that have caused the high turnover. Investment horizons have been shortened. This article discusses the changes.

Description: This article discusses a run on the bank that occurred in the Korean securities market.

Description: This is the second part of a 2 part series on Real options analysis (ROA). This article looks into the limitations of using financial option theory when doing real options analysis with projects that are long-dated and uncertain, such as: 1. First-degree homogeneity, 2. Uncertainty must derive from Brownian motion, and 3. Risk neutrality.