Quant ideas: Strategic versus tactical risk management

Strategic or enterprise risk management has long been seen as something of a Holy Grail for risk managers. However, the susceptibility of enterprise risk tools to poor quality data means the whole effort is likely to be misguided, argues Krzysztof Wolyniec, managing partner at Millwright Capital Management

The big unquestioned assumption is that explicit quantification of risk is always beneficial

In the practice of modern risk management, explicitly managing and accounting for risk is standard practice. The idea of risk management has been extended from a specific application for liquid financial portfolios to almost any decision involving uncertainty. For instance, enterprise risk management has been proposed as an advance on non-scientific traditions of historical management by focusing on the explicit analysis of all possible risks and, better yet, the explicit quantification and