Quantitative Reverse Stress Testing

A practitioner’s guide to quantitative reverse stress testing, featuring advanced solutions for better management of financial risks.

Whether you manage a portfolio, a business unit, or a bank, you must ensure that a sudden shock in the markets won’t drive you out of business because of a large loss, a jump in capital utilisation, or an increase in funding consumption. In financial risk management, reverse stress testing is the attempt to identify worst-case scenarios causing maximum financial loss. Traditional stress testing methods have failed to avert the last financial crisis or highlight financial distress. Occasionally, some regulators and risk managers specify stress scenarios with simplifications that create a false sense of safety. To avoid a combinatorial explosion, a number of arbitrary choices are usually made in relation to the level of each shock, their combination, and the time horizon. These assumptions, although necessary, limit the effectiveness of this technique.

Quantitative Reverse Stress Testing: Hunting for the Black Swan offers a more natural approach to identifying the realistic scenario provoking the largest losses. It also provides a means to understand the impact of extreme events and how to mitigate them while introducing technological advances and the adapted mathematical tools that have made it possible to solve this type of quantitative finance problem. You’ll see how mitigation strategies can be more accurate and better targeted, reducing risk, cost of funding, and regulatory capital.

With this book, you’ll have access to a comprehensive guide to crucial aspects of reverse stress testing.

• Get an introduction to a rigorous mathematical framework for quantitative reverse stress testing.
• Consider different heuristics, one of them based on annealing, to solve the optimisation problem.
• Review solution implementation, system infrastructure design, and integration into the financial risk management of a firm.
• Read related case studies from a variety of industries.

If it’s time to move your approach to reverse stress testing forward, this guide offers real solutions to optimisation and cost issues. Get a guide that supports a more informed approach to testing and financial risk management as it helps to protect vital business interests.