Preface
This book is based on an elective course entitled Financial Risk Manage-
ment I have taught at University of Toronto for many years. The main
focus of the book is on the risks faced by banks and other financial
institutions, but much of the material presented is equally important to
nonfinancial institutions. Like my popular text Options, Futures, and
Other Derivatives, this book is designed to be useful to practitioners as
well as college students.
The book is appropriate for elective courses in either risk management
or the management of financial institutions. It is not necessary for students
to take a course on options and futures markets prior to taking a course
based on this book, but if they have taken such a course much of the
material in the first four chapters will not need to be covered. Chapter 13
on credit derivatives and Chapter 17 on weather, energy, and insurance
derivatives can be skipped if this material is covered elsewhere or is not
considered appropriate. Chapter 18 on big losses and what we can learn
from them is a great chapter for the last class of a course because it draws
together many of the points made in earlier chapters.
The level of mathematical sophistication in the way material is pre-
sented has been managed carefully so that the book is accessible to as
wide an audience as possible. For example, when covering copulas in
Chapter 6, I present the intuition followed by a detailed numerical
example; when covering maximum-likelihood methods in Chapter 5
and extreme value theory in Chapter 9, I provide numerical examples
and enough details for readers to develop their own Excel spreadsheets.
This is a book about risk management and so there is very relatively little
material on the valuation of derivatives contracts. (This is the main focus
my other two books Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives and
Fundamentals of Futures and Options Markets.) For reference, I have
included at the end of the book appendices that summarize some of
the key derivatives pricing formulas that are important to risk managers.