Description: Institutional investors such as pension plans and insurance companies have enjoyed strong equity returns for a length of time with few historical precedents. Nearly a decade after the end of the financial crisis, strategies to provide downside protection remain expensive and the performance of traditional risk-managed funds has disappointed investors.

Description: Discusses the optimal consumption strategy in the presence of default risk. It highlights the Regime-Switching model, which indicates that the market situation may change and the distribution of an asset's return will change over time.

Description: This presentation examines the measurement and hedging of synthetic CDO tranche spread risks based on market spread data following the sub-prime crisis. A range of methods proposed for pricing bespoke CDOs are examined to assess their ability to hedge the credit spread risk. The methods assessed are calibrated to the traded CDO index spread and then compared based on the mean absolute pricing errors over a time period including the sub-prime crisis. Standard pricing methods and variations used to price bespoke CDOs generally perform poorly in hedging credit spread risk. Past data can be used to improve the performance of the methods. The results of this analysis also raise concerns with the accuracy of 'mark-to-model' valuations of bespoke CDOs using standard market methods.