The boring risk training course traffic update

It has been an uphill and downhill ride for the last two years. We have had many moments to celebrate as well as a handful of frustrating close calls. But this morning as I looked at the analytics I realized that we had crossed two important milestones on our second anniversary of launch as a formal business.

Let’s start first with the good news. This January two of our primary channels, our Risk and Investment online training site and our Finance Training Videos YouTube channel crossed an all time high in terms of monthly page views. FinanceTrainingCourse.com, the online risk training site crossed 40,000 page views a month, while our YouTube channel that showcases risk and investment management training videos crossed 5,000 monthly views. More importantly we have seen a consistent rise in pages per visits, average duration per visit and conversion rates over the last quarter.

Risk Training – Top Content

What are the visitors spending time on. Here is a list of our top ranked content over the last few months.

Forward rate calculation cheat sheet

Derivative Crash Course for dummies

Black Scholes probabilities – Understanding the difference between Nd1 and Nd2

Basel II, Basel III, Training Guide and Learning Roadmap

The Advance Risk Management Training Workshop – Resource page

Interest Rate Swaps – MTM and Valuation Guide

Monte Carlo Simulation – How to Reference

Black Scholes Equation – Intuitive Reference

PSR Limits – Counterparty Credit Risk

Option Greeks & Delta hedging series

Risk Training – Top Countries & Visitors

And where do these visitors come from. Last quarter’s review of traffic shows that the largest contributors of traffic remain the US and UK, followed by India, Pakistan and Canada.

Within the top 25 countries, US and UK contributed over 59% of total traffic (the actual number across the entire universe of visitors is lower).

Organic search remained the largest source, followed by direct visitors, followed by referrals.

Challenges and let downs

The biggest challenge this year has been malware attacks on the site and the resulting downtime. We have luckily been able to move completely to AWS this January after another spate of attacks on our related sites in December 2012.

AWS has also fixed once and for all our scalability and traffic spike problems. With hindsight, the next time I would do this, I won’t waste my time on any other provider of hosting services and just go directly to AWS.

Who says online risk training is boring originally appeared on Crude Oil Insights on February 1, 2013.

What is Risk? Introductory training series for risk professionals.

A number of banking and regulatory customers requested a collection of basic and introductory training materials on risk management. Sometimes as trainers we forget that not everyone speaks the language of risk with the same fluency.

The three posts that follow, represent the first installment in our new training series on risk. Because we expected the initial selection to also serve as standalone guides, there is some overlap.

The first post provides basic context and sets the tone for risk assessment for financial risks. The second takes a more general view and also serves as the central point for accessing almost everything we have written and shared on this subject over the last few years.

The third and final jumps straight into value at risk calculations and adds a few advance topics. Such as tweaking your Monte Carlo Simulation engine for using actual historical distribution data (walking away from Normality) and calculating Value at Risk (VaR) using Historical Simulation for Interest Rate Swaps, FRA’s and Cross Currency Swaps.

What is Risk? Risk Assessment mindset

What is Risk? Risk measurement – Self Study reading & training materials.

Risk management. From risk to Value at Risk

If you like the materials, drop us a line and tell us what you would like us to add topic wise

What is Risk? The new risk assessment & risk management training series originally appeared on Crude Oil Insights on December 28, 2012.

Financial Risk Management Training Course

Figure 1 Financial Risk Management Training Course – PD Model using the Merton structured approach

The trouble with teaching Financial Risk Management Online is with the amount of ground a trainer has to cover within the allocated two days. The Financial Risk Management Training course reference was put together as a pre-reading tool that clients and students could use to get up to speed with the content and the materials of our financial risk training workshop.

The two online courses on financial risk management are divided into an introductory course and an advance topics course.

Introduction to Financial Risk Management Training Course

The introductory course uses foundation building materials from Value at Risk & ALM and a few hands on cases. The introductory financial risk management course link includes podcasts, downloadable data sets, power point presentations and case studies. Case studies use spot exposure to oil and gold.

Advance Financial Risk Management Training Course

The Advance course focused on Excel model building using financial risk training themes covered earlier.   We cover portfolio optimization, delta hedging, excel solver, credit risk and bank regulation. On the credit risk side we use market data to evaluate the probability of default of the USD LIBOR BBA Panel Banks – which leads to some interesting insights.

The objective was to mix and match financial risk management frameworks, case studies and hands on risk model building exercises. The solved solution uses a margin risk management case study for a commodities hedge fund and evaluate the usage of value at risk and the Merton structured approach to estimate Probability of Default, margin requirements, loss given default, capital allocation and a decision on future and additional exposure based on portfolio weights. Ideally you should take a look at the Sample Exam – Financial Risk Management Course – Past Final Exam which includes the solved solution and then decide if the two courses will teach you anything new.

Course content covers topics from the following core risk management themes:

1. Introduction to Financial Risk Management
2. Introduction to Value at Risk
3. Introduction to Delta and Higher Order Hedging
4. Asset Liability Management
5. Probability of Default

Suggested training course instruction time is 36 hours spread over 12 days of classes with 3 hours per day. The outline and the course material require a heavy reading and in class modeling load and are not recommended for the light hearted.

Both courses were recently delivered to a group of 20+ GMBA students at the SP Jain campus in Dubai and are based on the tested materials used as part of our treasury and risk management training practice. Content and case studies for the training courses have been developed as a result of consulting work done for clients in the treasury, risk and investment management sectors over the last 10 years.

Financial Risk Management Training Course originally appeared on Crude Oil Insights on October 1, 2012.

Seven new free risk and portfolio management case studies – Value at Risk, ALM, Greeks & Monte Carlo Simulation tweaks

We have been busy over the last three months.

As part of the effort around the re-launch of FinanceTrainingCourse.com website on Amazon Web Services and the be a Finance Rock Star campaign we put together seven new case studies for our risk, investment and treasury management customers.

The seven risk, treasury and investment management case studies cover Value at Risk (VaR), Asset Liability Management (ALM), Jet Fuel Hedging, Barclays Libor Scandal, Fixed Income Portfolio Optimization, Option Price Sensitivity – Greeks & a advance Monte Carlo Simulation tweak for increasing the speed of convergence without increasing the computational overhead.

The Value at Risk (VaR), Asset Liability Management (ALM) and Fixed Income Portoflio Optimization case studies do a step by step walk through of building the model using MS Excel. We haven’t held anything back and all you need is your laptop, a cup of coffee and a little bit of time to rebuild the same model on your laptop.

The Greeks (Delta and Gamma) dissection uses graphical tools to define behavior of the two Greeks across Spot, Time, Volatility, Strike and Interest Rates. Jet Fuel Hedging, Barclays LIBOR and Monte Carlo Variance Reduction tweaks are contextual case studies without any excel model building effort or documentation. Greeks, Fuel Hedging and Monte Carlo, if you are not careful will give you a run for your money.

The Barclays LIBOR piece is the easiest read of them all. Just background and insights, no models, equations or twisted concepts.

Understanding Value at Risk (VaR) – A detailed step by step study guide

Understanding Asset Liability Management (ALM) – Simple balance sheet, simple examples, core ALM concepts

Jet Aviation Fuel Hedging Case Study

The Sales & Trading Interview Guide to the Barclays Libor scandal

Fixed Income Investment Portfolio Management & Optimization – Using Excel Solver to rebalance and fine tune your portfolios

Options and Derivative pricing – Understanding Greeks -A graphical dissection of Delta & Gamma

Monte Carlo Simulation – Antithetic Sampling and Variance Reduction Techniques

The case studies were put together as part of the Derivative pricing and Risk Management course series Jawwad teaches at the SP Jain campus in Dubai and Singapore and were tested by EMBA and GMBA students in class. The more advance concepts and topics were developed as part of the treasury and corporate treasury solutions sales workshop we have been running for our treasury and banking customers in the Middle East.

If you like what you see here or would like us to build a detailed step by step case study on a topic that you feel has a large audience, please drop us a note. We will add it to our task list.

Enjoy.

Seven new risk and investment management case studies – Free Step by step guides to VaR, ALM, Greeks & Monte Carlo Simulation .. originally appeared on Crude Oil Insights on September 5, 2012.

Very excited about the new artwork, branding and design behind the Risk and Finance Rock Star campaigns launching later this week.

After a first round of testing the 90 second video spot has now been finalized and will go live on Youtube later tonight.

Stay tuned, more exciting stuff planned for launch in early August 2012. Brought to you by the fine folks at FinanceTrainingCourse.com

The Risk and Finance Rock Star campaigns… originally appeared on Crude Oil Insights on July 31, 2012.

The content business is all about slicing and repackaging. It’s a difficult lesson that we have learnt after playing with specialized risk and treasury management education over the last four years. A journey that started with a market risk metrics publishing experiment in 2008 that after six different pivots ultimately became our most popular risk training reference site.

The same experiment spun off the FourQuants.com brand. In December 2011 we started playing with smart phone and apps for smart phones, in search for a different channel for our training content. Midway through the process, Arbab, Scheheryar and Uzma started thinking about the new ibooks Author platform on the iPad. Why the iPad? Because compared to the iPhone, any other android smart phone or tablet, it’s just a completely difference experience. Our smart phone app experience taught us that when it comes to relevant audience and targeted marketing in our sector (banks and financial services) nothing came close to the reach of the iPad.

Uzma put together a short prototype for a risk ibook in April that was immediately approved. It had everything that we had been looking for. Text, Video, Interactivity, Self Assessment.

The question was which title? We looked at our training experience on FinanceTrainingCourse.com and picked the two most popular downloads and topics over the last twenty four months. Value at Risk (VaR) and Asset Liability Management.

Then started four months of slog that finished when the two risk ibook titles were finally released on the iTune store.

iPadRiskBooks.com is our new dedicated site for our Risk and Treasury management training series for the iPad. Planned titles scheduled for release over the next four months include the VaR and ALM Test bank, Setting Counterparty Limits, Selling Treasury Products, Monte Carlo Simulation and Derivative Pricing. All selected from our most popular risk and treasury courses in the online as well as the offline world.

Let’s see where this next adventure takes us.

You had been wondering where in the world was I hiding? I promised that I one of these days I would let you in to our secret.

Welcome to the latest product launch by the Alchemy family.

Introducing iPadRiskBooks.com originally appeared on Crude Oil Insights on July 27, 2012.

Oil futures rose amidst US gasoline supplies decreasing and the housing sales in the US picking up pace. Brent Crude futures rose by 0.83 percent to USD $ 106.03 per barrel, while WTI crude futures rose by 0.79 percent to be at USD $ 90.58 per barrel.

The US Energy Department declared in a report released yesterday that gasoline stockpiles fell to 1.8 million barrels last week, whereas they had been estimated to increase by 1.2 million barrels. Furthermore, the report also stated that US oil demand was at an average of 19 million barrels a day over the past four weeks, which is an increase of 0.4 percent from its demand for the same duration of time last year. Also, consumption of oil has increased by 0.3 percent to 18.6 million barrels a day on a week-to-week basis over the past seven days.

The US Commerce Department reported that housing starts increased by 6.9 percent to 760,000 annual, up from their previously estimated figure of 711,000 annual.

Therefore, an increase in the demand of crude oil from the world’s largest oil consumer, coupled with a slight fall in crude stockpiles as well as greater optimism about the recovery of the US economy has pushed up the price of crude oil futures.

Falling Oil Supplies originally appeared on Crude Oil Insights on July 19, 2012.

Oil futures fell from a seven week high price after new data released showed that the economic recovery in China was weaker than previously expected. Brent crude futures declined by 0.31 percent to USD $ 103.68 per barrel, while WTI crude futures declined by 0.28 percent to USD $ 88.97 per barrel. There have also been growing concerns that Europe’s debt crisis will hamper global economic growth this year, which will adversely affect the future demand in oil.

According to statements published on the Chinese Government website, the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabo, said that the labor market condition in the country was more “severe” than previously expected. This has raised speculations about the economic growth in China not being as high as previously expected, which would translate into a lower than expected demand of crude oil from the second largest consumer in the world.

Oil futures also fell owing to concerns that the economy in Europe was still not strong enough to warrant a high demand of oil from the continent. According to the BP’s Annual Statistical Review of World Energy, 16 percent of the world’s oil consumption was attributed to Europe last year. With the Euro Zone’s economy still not picking up pace, it is believed that the demand of crude oil from the Euro Zone might not match up to last year’s consumption, which has led to a decline in the price of crude futures.

Chinese data worse than expected originally appeared on Crude Oil Insights on July 18, 2012.

Crude oil futures rose to a seven week high owing to rising tensions between the United States and Iran, along with expectations about the US Federal Reserve increasing the stimulus in the US economy. Brent crude futures increased by 0.29 percent to be at USD $ 103.670 per barrel, while WTI crude futures rose by 0.16 percent to be at USD $ 88.570 per barrel.

On the last leg of her twelve country trip in Israel, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that the United States would use “all elements of American power” to prevent Iran from developing its nuclear technology. In retaliation to the sanctions imposed on it, Iran has threatened to close down the Strait of Hormuz, from which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes. These hard talks have raised fears about supply getting disrupted in the near future, due to which oil future prices have been fluctuating lately. Ms. Clinton’s latest comments have risen the speculative buying in the market, due to which prices have risen.

A report released by the US Commerce Department showed that sales had decreased in the month of June. There is a general consensus that the US Federal Reserve might launch another round of Quantitative Easing, a program under which asset buying was fostered while reducing the cost of borrowing. In this way, Quantitative Easing is supposed to inhibit economic growth.

US pressure on Iran heating up originally appeared on Crude Oil Insights on July 17, 2012.

After increasing for three consecutive days, oil futures fell on Monday, the 16^th of July 2012. The main reason for this sudden mood shift in the market was due to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabo, stating that the expected economic recovery of China for the second half of this year was yet to gain momentum. Brent crude futures fell by 0.20 percent to be at USD $102.20 per barrel, while WTI futures declined by 0.62 percent to fall to USD $ 86.56 per barrel.

The Chinese Premier’s remarks dampened much of the idea that had been prevalent in the market during the past week, which was that a lower than expected economic growth rate for China in the second quarter of this year hinted towards a greater economic stimulus in the Chinese economy. This increased stimulus would require an increase in the demand of oil from China, which is the world’s second largest oil consumer after the United States. However, now, the general feeling in the market is that the future demand for oil from China might not be as much as was expected, hence leading to a fall in the price of oil futures.

Oil futures also fell because Abu Dhabi was able to start exporting oil via the port of Fujairah, while bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has repeatedly warned that it would close down the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation to the sanctions imposed on it earlier this year.  These threats from Iran had resulted in fears about possible future supply bottlenecks, leading to an increase in the price of oil futures. However, with Abu Dhabi starting to export oil while completely bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, much of these supply fears have been addressed, and thus, the price of oil futures has fallen.

Chinese Premier disappoint investors originally appeared on Crude Oil Insights on July 17, 2012.