Financial Risk Management For Dummies

Introduction

Risk management is about preparing for anything that might happen. People who try to predict the future are the enemies of risk management. They’re the ones who say, ‘Let’s build a wall on the north side of town because that’s where we predict the attack will come.’ Risk managers know that leaving any gap in the wall means the attackers will exploit the gap.

Preventing disaster is easy – you just don’t take any risk. Risk management is about surviving disaster, not preventing it. If there weren’t disasters, you wouldn’t call it risk. You need risk – and its attendant disasters – to learn, to grow, to excel.

If you want to be a risk manager, this book gives you a good start. You need practice at risk taking, plus some maths and financial theory, plus some practice at finance. If you already have all of those things, you should be writing this book, not reading it.

About This Book

People have been concerned about risk as long as there have been people. Financial Risk Management For Dummies explains the background and some theory about risk, quantitative analysis of risk and modern financial risk management and shows you how to apply them in practice, without jargon or mathematics. Okay, I throw in a few examples that require addition and multiplication, but they’re clearly labelled and can be skipped, and I also give you lots of simple, specific illustrations.

This book tells you what financial risk managers do and why they do it.

Foolish Assumptions

I make three different ...