8008 Exam Dumps : PRM Certification - Exam III: Risk Management Frameworks, Operational Risk, Credit Risk, Counterparty Risk, Market Risk, ALM, FTP - 2015 Edition

Incremental VaR is the change in portfolio VaR resulting from a change in a single position. This is accurately described by VaR_(p+a) - VaR_p. The other answers are incorrect, and describe other concepts.

It is important to know and understand the ideas behind MVaR (marginal VaR), CVaR (component VaR) and iVaR (incremental VaR), and the differences between them.

For operational risk modeling, both frequency and severity distributions need to be modeled. Modeling severity involves finding an analytical distribution, such as log-normal or other that approximates the distribution best represented by known data - whether from the internal loss database, the external loss database or scenario data. A 'risk functional' is a measure of the deviation of the model distribution from the risk's actual severity distribution. It assigns a penalty value for the deviation, using a statistical measure, such as the KS distance (Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance).

The problem of finding the right distribution then becomes the problem of optimizing the risk functional. For example, if F is the model distribution, and G is the actual, or empirical severity distribution, and we are using the KS test, then the Risk Functional R is defined as follows:

Note that supx stands for 'supremum', which is a more technical way of saying 'maximum'. In other words, we are calculating the maximum absolute KS distance between the two distributions. (Note that the KS distance is the max of the distance between identical percentiles of the two distributions using the CDFs of the two.)

Once the risk functional is identified, we can minimize it to determine the best fitting distribution for severity.

A computation of Altman's Z-score considers the following ratios:

- Working capital to total assets

- Retained earnings to total assets

- EBIT to total assets

- Market cap to debt

- Sales to total assets

Nearly all the numbers above are accounting measures derived straight from the balance sheet or the income statement. Market capitalization is a market driven number. Therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer as the Altman credit risk score considers both accounting and market based measures.

Altman's score, though computationally straightforward and intuitively easy to understand, was introduced in the late sixties and has been very accurate in predicting corporate bankruptcies, which is why it continues to be used extensively.