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                   STRESS TESTING-INSIGHTS ON RISK MANAGEMENT 
                    
                  PRMIA Toronto would like to invite you to attend the Global 
                    Event Series on Stress Testing. 
                    The recent financial crisis has highlighted a number of shortcomings 
                    in risk managements, especially when liquidity dries up or 
                    large tail events occur. Combining traditional risk metrics 
                    with additional risk measurement tools such as stress tests 
                    adds qualitative judgement to the existing quantitative framework. 
                    Join us for an insightful discussion on stress testing with 
                    industry experts. Attendees will also have the opportunity 
                    to network and enjoy light refreshments in a relaxed environment. 
                  Speakers: 
                    Melissa Van Hees (Concordia Advisors) 
                    Stress Testing: A practitioner's perspective 
                  Financial instability is here to stay, therefore stress testing 
                    will continue to be an important part of the risk managers' 
                    tool kit. Stress tests in the past used to mostly focus independently 
                    on each type of risk (market, counterparty, credit, liquidity, 
                    operational) and were performed inside the risk function with 
                    little dissemination to outside groups. The tests also tended 
                    to rely too much on probabilistic approaches. Stress testing 
                    must be comprehensive, integrated, and incorporate systemic 
                    considerations. The presentation will touch on some newer 
                    concepts such as reverse stress tests, varying time horizons, 
                    and stressing the entire balance sheet. Infrastructure and 
                    changes to existing governance frameworks will also be discussed. 
                   
                  Dr. Lance Smith (Imagine Software) 
                  Stress testing has become the pre-eminent tool for portfolio 
                    risk management, supplanting the traditional parametric VaR 
                    calculation. As a consequence risk management has, in a way, 
                    become more subjective in that there is no clear methodology 
                    for designing these stress tests: what factors should be stressed, 
                    by how much and with what probability? In addition, when stressing 
                    a particular factor, how can we quantify the collateral effect 
                    on the remaining factors? The parametric VaR calculation, 
                    while deficient in some ways is not nearly as subjective in 
                    that the inputs are usually computed from time series using 
                    standard statistical algorithms. We seek a way to meld both 
                    methods together in a way that maintains the intuitiveness 
                    of stress testing and the statistical rigor of parametric 
                    VaR. This idea can be extended to the nonlinear factor approach 
                    to risk management, as well as to empirical distributions. 
                  Event moderator: Grigoris Karakoulas (Infoagora) 
                  Agenda: 
                  5:15 pm Opening/ registration 
                    5:30 pm  6:30 pm Speaker presentations 
                    6:30 pm Questions and Answers, Networking  
                  PRMIA Toronto would like to thank Imagine Software for sponsoring 
                    this event. 
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