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

Survivorship bias is the tendency for failed companies, funds, investments and even entire markets (eg Russian stock market returns after the Communist revolution) to be excluded from performance studies because they no longer exist. Survivorship bias results in past results looking better than they actually were as data points relating to failures are not included.

A risk manager needs to be aware of survivorship bias when basing risk analysis on historical data and should question if failures (eg failed funds, delisted companies etc) have been included in the data he or she is relying upon.

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.

As part of a reverse stress test, a firm has to identify and assess the scenarios most likely to cause it to fail, or in other words using the language used by the FSA in the UK, for its current business plan to become unviable. A firm's business plan should be considered to become unviable at the point that crystallizing risks cause the market to lose confidence it it, with the consequence that counterparties and other stakeholders are unwilling to transact with it or provide capital to the firm and, where releant, that existing counterparties may seek to terminate their contracts. Recent experience suggests that this point is reached well before a firm's regulatory capital is exhausted.

Large known losses, or negative EBITDA (earnings before interest , tax, depreciation and amortization) may be indicators or contribute to the loss of confidence, but do not of themselves make the current business plan unviable. Therefore Choice 'd' is the correct answer.