Vine Copula based Portfolio Level Conditional Risk Measure Forecasting

Accurately estimating risk measures for financial portfolios and validating their robustness is critical for both financial institutions and regulators. However, many existing models operate at the aggregate portfolio level, hence they fail to capture the complex cross-dependencies between portfolio components and particularly provide no methodology to perform a sensitivity analysis on the estimates. To address both aspects, a new approach is presented that uses vine copulas in combination with univariate ARMA-GARCH models for marginal modelling to compute conditional portfolio-level risk measure estimates by simulating portfolio-level forecasts conditioned on a stress factor. A quantile-based approach is then presented to observe the behaviour of risk measures given a particular state of the conditioning asset(s). In an illustrative case study of Spanish equities with different stress factors, the results show that the portfolio is quite robust to a sharp downturn in the American market. At the same time, there is no evidence of this behaviour with respect to the European market. The novel algorithms presented are ready for use through the R package portvine, which is publicly available on CRAN.