Open source software is all the rage those days in IT and the concept is making rapid inroads in all parts of the enterprise. An earlier comprehensive survey by Gartner, Inc. found that by 2011 more than half of organizations surveyed had adopted open-source software (OSS) solutions as part of their IT strategy. This percentage may have currently exceeded the 75% mark according to open source advisory firms.
You know the periodic table of elements, even if you flunked your science courses! It is the large colorful and blocky table that hanged on every school’s classrooms before becoming yet another mobile app. The periodic table is one of the early and iconic achievements of science. It lists all the pure chemical elements found in nature, the building blocks of all possible material substances. Each block contains a set of numbers that unambiguously characterizes each element and a single or two letter abbreviation for each: H for Hydrogen, He for Helium and so forth, going on for over a hundred different elements. When the periodic table was discovered by Mendeleev (apparently in his dream!) it was an extraordinary realization that the physical world has an underlying order at the microscopic level. In his own words:
Senior economists such as Ben Bernanke were still studying the 30’s Great Depression when the financial crisis struck in full force circa 2007. Given the complexity of the modern economic and financial landscape compared to the blessed good old days - we have no reports of FWMD (financial weapons of mass destruction) from back then - we can reasonably project that economists will be studying and pontificating on causes and remedies for the current crisis for the next 100 years or so.
When talking about risk management, it is not very clear what we are talking about in broad terms, it is definitely not getting clearer when we start getting into the details and it is finally not clear how to best use the (possibly flawed) insights we produce.
FuriousBanker(TM) helps you learn risk management concepts in a fun and engaging way. This educational game series for mobiles and tablets is developed by Open Risk to enable modern interactive elearning for people working (or aspiring to work) in financial risk management.
The first episode sees FuriousBanker facing The credit detox challenge:
We are happy to publish the first installment of a trilogy that focuses on the risk factors that can turn any credit portfolio toxic.
The first topic is default correlation, a topic that is both core to understanding credit risk and much misunderstood.
Enjoy!
As part of the public beta testing programme, two new Open Risk Academy courses are accessible absolutely free (and with no strings attached :-).
The courses are introductions to measuring credit name or sector concentrations in credit portfolios. They cover the following topics:
The courses run from Oct 7th till Oct 13th. Read more about prerequisites for the courses here:
A CrashCourse (short course) introducing the Open Risk Academy for first time users is now available here. Please try it out!
Building out further the Open Risk Academy curriculum around Credit Risk Concentration management, we just added a course on sector concentration.
Alpha testing did not reveal any fatal problems with the website or the Open Risk Academy website. Many thanks to Odysseus for painstakingly testing everything!
As of this weekend login details were sent to select volunteers with a mission to further test drive Open Risk. This limited beta testing will be ongoing for the duration of May.
Pilot Course on Credit Name Concentration
We just added a new course at the Open Risk Academy!
The course covers name concentration risk measurement, chiefly the construction of suitable metrics based on portfolio data (Free registration is required for this course).
For more details see the course page.