Capturing Upside Risk

With more than three decades of experience as a thought-leader and expert practitioner, PMI Fellow Dr. David Hillson shares practical insight into how upside risks can be identified, assessed, and managed as opportunities. After reviewing the benefits of identifying opportunities, the book steps through the opportunity identification and management process in detail, describing proven tools and techniques as well as specific tips to make them work in practice. The book places opportunity management in the context of traditional risk management, providing a familiar pathway that leads project managers to discover new benefits and successes. David Hillson is one of the foremost authorities on risk management. With his latest book he presents a strong case for managing opportunities. As with all of David’s books, the style of writing is engaging and easy to understand. There are many nuggets of wisdom in this book, as well as a hands-on approach to leveraging opportunity management as a way of improving project performance. — Cyndi Snyder Dionisio, PMI Fellow, Coronado CA, USA. (Chair of the PMBOK® Guide, Sixth Edition) I enjoyed reading this book, which is precise, clear, logical, and persuasive. The clarity of thought and expression explains why David is such a sought-after speaker. This book is a must-read for project risk practitioners, as well as for project professionals who are serious about addressing all the risks on their project, including the good ones. — Dr Dale Cooper, Cammeray NSW, Australia. (Director, Broadleaf Capital International) At last, a clear and valuable book linking both sides of the coin in risk management: threats and opportunities. David Hillson truly engages the reader on how to deal with these two types of risk in projects, sharing his wisdom and extensive experience in creating value from risk management. Anyone who has to manage risk in real-world projects should read this book to enhance their opportunity management skills. — Professor Salim Al-Harthi, Muscat, Oman. (Director of Risk Management Office, Sultan Qaboos University) It is vital for value creation in business and in life that we consider uncertainties that would have upside impacts on our objectives (opportunities), as well as downside impacts (threats). Business gets confused between opportunities where there is a binary choice to take or not, and true uncertain opportunities that can be seized, or left to chance. David has persevered in helping us understand this and this important book is a must-read for all leaders who want to create value through the proactive management of risk. — Dr Ruth Murray-Webster, Wakefield, UK. (Partner, Beyond the Deal LLP and Editor, APM Body of Knowledge, 7th Edition) As project managers, we always seem to focus on threats, negative risks. David Hillson, one of the foremost thought-leaders on risk management, explains approaches to identify and manage opportunities, positive risks and how this will help achieve project success. As with his previous books, David provides a structured approach with examples, tools, and techniques. An excellent resource for all project managers in today’s world. — Peter Monkhouse, Toronto ON, Canada. (Past Chair PMI Board of Directors)

With more than three decades of experience as a thought-leader and expert practitioner, PMI Fellow Dr. David Hillson shares practical insight into how upside risks can be identified, assessed, and managed as opportunities. After reviewing the benefits of identifying opportunities, the book steps through the opportunity identification and management process in detail, describing proven tools and techniques as well as specific tips to make them work in practice. The book places opportunity management in the context of traditional risk management, providing a familiar pathway that leads project managers to discover new benefits and successes. David Hillson is one of the foremost authorities on risk management. With his latest book he presents a strong case for managing opportunities. As with all of David’s books, the style of writing is engaging and easy to understand. There are many nuggets of wisdom in this book, as well as a hands-on approach to leveraging opportunity management as a way of improving project performance. — Cyndi Snyder Dionisio, PMI Fellow, Coronado CA, USA. (Chair of the PMBOK® Guide, Sixth Edition) I enjoyed reading this book, which is precise, clear, logical, and persuasive. The clarity of thought and expression explains why David is such a sought-after speaker. This book is a must-read for project risk practitioners, as well as for project professionals who are serious about addressing all the risks on their project, including the good ones. — Dr Dale Cooper, Cammeray NSW, Australia. (Director, Broadleaf Capital International) At last, a clear and valuable book linking both sides of the coin in risk management: threats and opportunities. David Hillson truly engages the reader on how to deal with these two types of risk in projects, sharing his wisdom and extensive experience in creating value from risk management. Anyone who has to manage risk in real-world projects should read this book to enhance their opportunity management skills. — Professor Salim Al-Harthi, Muscat, Oman. (Director of Risk Management Office, Sultan Qaboos University) It is vital for value creation in business and in life that we consider uncertainties that would have upside impacts on our objectives (opportunities), as well as downside impacts (threats). Business gets confused between opportunities where there is a binary choice to take or not, and true uncertain opportunities that can be seized, or left to chance. David has persevered in helping us understand this and this important book is a must-read for all leaders who want to create value through the proactive management of risk. — Dr Ruth Murray-Webster, Wakefield, UK. (Partner, Beyond the Deal LLP and Editor, APM Body of Knowledge, 7th Edition) As project managers, we always seem to focus on threats, negative risks. David Hillson, one of the foremost thought-leaders on risk management, explains approaches to identify and manage opportunities, positive risks and how this will help achieve project success. As with his previous books, David provides a structured approach with examples, tools, and techniques. An excellent resource for all project managers in today’s world. — Peter Monkhouse, Toronto ON, Canada. (Past Chair PMI Board of Directors)

This theses proposes novel methods to analyze risk and dependence across a joint probability distribution. It is well known in finance and insurance that risk and dependence are vastly different in the tails compared to the rest of the distribution. Tails characterize events such as market crisis and natural catastrophes, and contribute to a significant portion of overall risk and dependence. However, typical measures of risk and dependence capture the overall result and mask variations across the probability distribution. Random quantities are partitioned into infinitesimal layers capturing outcomes of various magnitude and likelihood. Risk and dependence are then measured across layers using established methods such as distortion and correlation. Layers are standard constructs representing (re)insurance coverage, capital consumption and shortfall, derivative payouts, and tranches of collateralised debt obligations. This thesis expresses layer endpoints using percentiles or more commonly known as Values-at-Risk (VARs), hence each layer occupies a relative position in the probability distribution. This thesis also extends distortion risk measurement by capturing upside risk in addition to downside risk. In financial and insurance markets with strong competition and limited availability of capital, an explicit view of upside risk is required to reflect opportunity costs. Developments in this thesis formalise existing, and reveal new, insights to risk and diversification.For example, the framework explains weak diversification in financial and insurance markets despite moderate correlations overall. The framework also deals with problems such as setting capital buffers, reinsurance purchase and assessing the credit quality of debt tranches. These insights arise from a deeper understanding of how risk and dependence varies across a probability distribution. Proposed methods apply consistent concepts such as VaRs, distortion and layers, and hence form a coherent analytical framework. These concepts are well established and hence the resulting framework integrates and expands current disparate approaches. The proposed framework is a complete tool to quantitative risk management, by first analysing risk and dependence when imperfectly dependent random quantities are aggregated, and then guiding strategies to optimally manage and reduce risk.

In high-stakes investing and business, success or failure largely depends on how well you play the game of risk-a game in which the rules of competition are constantly being rewritten. Strategies that proved effective in the past are no longer enough to win today. The key to success is not to rely on yesterday's news, but to peer into the future and ask what could happen tomorrow. Presenting a bold new way of thinking about risk, in Seeing Tomorrow Ron Dembo and Andrew Freeman offer a dynamic framework designed to enhance our ability to make important decisions, and consequently change how we manage our investments. By incorporating investors' individual circumstances and tolerances -as well as the unique reasoning behind their decision making-this innovative approach captures much more of how we actually think about risk. From the basic building blocks required for forward-looking risk management, Dembo and Freeman define and explore the roles and significance of such fundamentals as time horizons, risk measures, benchmarks, and scenarios. Once the foundation is laid, these elements are used to construct a solid architecture for risk management and risk-adjusted analysis that is not only general enough to be able to handle a multitude of risks, but also able to present many different measures of risk. With clear-cut explanations and intriguing real-world examples, Seeing Tomorrow leads you step by step through the authors' groundbreaking risk rules. These include: choosing an appropriate time horizon, selecting scenarios, computing Value at Risk (VAR), assessing both the upside and downside of a potential deal, calculating Regret, and compiling a reliable Regret matrix. By combining Regret, Upside, and a measure of our tolerance for risk, the authors demonstrate how these components create a powerful new way of approaching decisions. They offer guidance on very specific real life problems-such as buying a house or suing someone-as well as on broad matters of strategy and investing. Written by two leading authorities in the field, Seeing Tomorrow is a milestone addition to risk literature that will dramatically alter the way you view, identify, and manage risk. It is must reading for investors and decision makers alike. "Seeing Tomorrow is a powerhouse in the understanding of risk. With their ingenious blend of psychology and rigorous quantitative analysis, the authors have created an authoritative and innovative handbook of risk management that is essential for both practitioners and theoreticians." -Peter L. Bernstein author, Against the Gods and Capital Ideas. "This excellent and readable book provides an innovative approach to choosing actions when the outcomes are uncertain. Anyone with an interest in improving their decision-making skills would benefit from reading this. Anyone with a professional interest in risk management must read it." -Stephen A. Ross Fischer Black Visiting Professor of Finance Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management Sterling Professor of Economics and Finance, Yale University. "Ron Dembo and Andrew Freeman have done an excellent job of describing how to think about and measure risk. This will become required reading for businesses and personal investment executives." -Ned C. Lautenbach.

Investment in the financial markets is guided by the trade-off between expected returns and risk appetite of the investor. Higher risks could possibly result in higher expected return on the upside risk but the possibility of massive downside risk of loss must never escape the investor. The dynamic market condition should shape an investor's macro-economic perception with a view to taming the market but not to beat the market for the latter is a herculean and elusive task to undertake. Portfolio theory draws from the theory of the firm only that the former deals with investors both rational and irrational with a view to optimal asset mix in a diversified portfolio subject to future uncertainty. Models have been developed to analyze economic equilibrium in the face of optimizing investors including CAPM and APT an analysis of which forms the basis of this paper with a brief look on portfolio performance.

This book offers a practical insight to leaders who need to make good decisions in risky and important situations. The authors describe a process for making risk-intelligent decisions, explaining complex ideas simply, and mapping a route through the myriad interrelated influences when groups make decisions that matter. The approach puts the decision maker—you—at the center and explains how you can think and act differently to make better decisions more of the time. The book shows how to Determine the appropriate level of risk Make decisions in uncertain and turbulent conditions Understand how risks are perceived to identify them accurately Develop new behaviors to improve decision-making Making Risky and Important Decisions: A Leader’s Guide builds on earlier ground-breaking publications from these two recognized thought leaders. Their first book together, Understanding and Managing Risk Attitude, brought together the language of risk and risk-taking with the language of emotional intelligence and emotional literacy. Managing Group Risk Attitude followed, and focused on decision-making groups, creating new insights and frameworks. Both books are positioned as specialist textbooks, despite their relevance to real-world situations. A Short Guide to Risk Appetite brought together the concepts of risk appetite and risk attitude into one place for the first time, cutting through confusing terminology and confused thinking to create a practical way of understanding "how much risk is too much risk." This latest installment from Ruth Murray-Webster and David Hillson takes the breadth of their previous work, adds new insights and thinking, and distills it into a highly usable guide for hard-pressed leaders.

A timely approach to downside risk and its role in stock market investments When dealing with the topic of risk analysis, most books on investments treat downside and upside risk equally. Preparing for the Worst takes an entirely novel approach by focusing on downside risk and explaining how to incorporate it into investment decisions. Highlighting this asymmetry of the stock market, the authors describe how existing theories miss the downside and follow with explanations of how it can be included. Various techniques for calculating downside risk are demonstrated. This book presents the latest ideas in the field from the ground up, making the discussion accessible to mathematicians and statisticians interested in applications in finance, as well as to finance professionals who may not have a mathematical background. An invaluable resource for anyone wishing to explore the critical issues of finance, portfolio management, and securities pricing, this book: Incorporates Value at Risk into the theoretical discussion Uses many examples to illustrate downside risk in U.S., international, and emerging market investments Addresses downside risk arising from fraud and corruption Includes step-by-step instructions on how to implement the methods introduced in this book Offers advice on how to avoid pitfalls in calculations and computer programming Provides software use information and tips

From Ron Dembo, advisor to leading banks and hedge funds, and Daniel Stoffman, co-author of the revolutionary bestseller Boom, Bust and Echo, Upside, Downside is an accessible guide to the biggest danger facing investors in an increasingly uncertain world: financial risk. As a generation of investors knows, financial markets are vulnerable to events – from terrorist attacks to epidemics – that are guaranteed to occur, yet impossible to predict. As markets become more complex and intertwined, investors feel increasingly unsure: how can you safeguard your financial prospects when you can’t know what the future will look like? Upside, Downside is a toolbox to protect yourself from financial risk. Co-authored by a leading financial journalist and a pioneer in the field of risk management who advises the world’s major banks, it gives investors access for the first time to the most advanced risk management strategies available, distilled into three simple rules for managing risk. These rules – Knowing What You Own, Using Multiple Scenarios, and Anticipating Regret – will allow you to take control of your financial future. You can’t banish all the dangers of the world, but Upside, Downside will give you the skills to manage them.

Effective risk management allows opportunities to be maximized and uncertainty to be minimized. This guide for emerging professionals provides a comprehensive understanding of risk management with tools, tips and tactics on how to offer expert insights and drive success in an ever-changing area, covering everything from Covid-19 and digitization to climate change. Fundamentals of Risk Management is a detailed and comprehensive introduction to commercial and business risk for students and risk professionals. Completely aligned with ISO 31000 and the COSO ERM Framework, this book covers the key principles of risk management and how to deal with the different types of risk organizations face. The frameworks of business continuity planning, enterprise risk management, and project risk management are covered alongside an overview of international risk management standards and frameworks, strategy and policy. The revised sixth edition includes brand new content on trends such as cyber risk, black swan events and climate risk. It has been fully updated to place the emphasis on seeing risk as 'positive' rather than a 'constant threat', and establishes that risk is different in a digital/VUCA age. Additionally, it considers in detail the impact of the climate crisis and its effect on risk management activities. Further updates from the previous edition include brand new case studies on the failure of Arcadia, HBO's bankruptcy and Boohoo's issues with modern slavery, this book provides a full analysis of changes in contemporary risk areas including digital risk management, risk culture and appetite, supply chain and statutory risk reporting. Supporting online resources include lecture slides with figures, tables and key points from the book