Hello @silver7Could anyone explain to me how you arrive at the 6.6234 on page 26? Thanks so much!
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"This shows that the forward position can be separated into three cash flows: (1) a long spot position in EUR, worth EUR 100 million = $130.09 million in a year, or (Se-r*r) = $125.89 million now, (2) a long position in a EUR investment, also worth $125.89 million now, and (3) a short position in a USD investment, worth $130.09 million in a year, or (Ke-YZ) = $125.89 million now. Thus a position in the forward contract has three building blocks:
Long forward contract = long foreign currency spot + long foreign currency bill + short U.S. dollar bill
Considering only the spot position, the VAR is $125.89 million times the risk of 4.538 percent, which is $5.713 million. To compute the diversified VAR, we use the risk matrix from the data in Table 11-6 and pre- and postmultiply by the vector of positions (PV of flows column in the table). The total VAR for the forward contract is $5.735 million. This number is about the same size as that of the spot contract because exchange-rate volatility dominates the volatility of 1-year bonds." -- Philippe Jorion. Value at Risk, 3rd Ed.: The New Benchmark for Managing Financial Risk (p. 292). Kindle Edition.
Hi @silver7
The $6.6234 is a essentially a portfolio variance (scaled/multiplied by the 1.645 deviate) in matrix form; so it's really the same 2-asset portfolio variance except generalized here to five positions, where each position is an individual VaR (the risk of a single cash flow which has been mapped to one of the five vertices; aka, risk factors). A portfolio variance is given by--to use Jorion's notation--the fundamentally important w' * Σ * w, where Σ is a covariance matrix and (w) is the vector of weights/positions, such that w' is the transposed vector. The calculation you pasted is from my replication of Jorion's Table 11-4, of course. This Table 11-4 that produces the $6.6234 is just a variation on this classic portfolio variance, is how I look at it. Just as covariance embeds correlation into the 2-asset special case--i.e., covariance(1,2) = σ(1)*ρ(1,2)*σ(2)--the portfolio variance breaks down further if we want to specify the correlation matrix (which is used as an input) rather then the covariance matrix, such that this $6.6234 = (xV')*R*(xV), where (R) is the correlation matrix, (xV) = the (column) vector of individual VaRs (e.g., $0.4917) which are themselves the produce of the PF of CF (x) and the Risk(%), and (xV') is the same but transposed in the row vector. First step is post-multiply the R*(xV), then pre-multiply (xV')*[R*(xV)] to get th $6.6234. This is all in the learning XLS, including the matrix calculations.
In regard to Jorion's Table 11-6 / 11-7 (the second exhibit):
I do totally realize the notes can do a better job explaining all of this. With each iteration, we are improving the explanation. I hope this is helpful, thanks!
- Individual VaRs = PV of flows * VaR(%); e.g., $5.72 = 125.93 * 4.5381%; as usual, the sum of Individual VaRs = undiversified VaR (= diversified VaR if all pairwise ρs = 1.0)
- Marginal VaR = α 1.645 * cov(factor i, factor j,)/
varianceσ(portfolio) per Jorion 7.17; i.e., marginal VaR is a direct function of beta(i, P)- Component VaR = PV of flows * Marginal VaR; i.e., $5.706 = $125.93 * 0.0453
- Diversified VaR is the sum of component VaRs, as it must be
Hi David
I am trying to get my head around how Rxv is being calculated. Could you throw some light on that? I tried summing up the correlation (across different tenors) and then multiplying it with xv but it didnt match. Appreciate if you can help?
Thanks
Arun
Hi @Rohit Please see my draft XLS here (which recreates Jorion's Table 11-7; FRA mapping): https://www.dropbox.com/s/oh5i7hdpivj5szd/jorion-11-7-fra-mapping.xlsx?dl=0
ie, component VaRs, per Jorion's label, are product of PV of CF ("x") and the Marginal VaRs, which i did successfully calculate (no time to explain all of that, see XLS). Hope this helps,