2016-FRR Leak Questions

Equity indices are numerical calculations that reflect the performance of hypothetical equity portfolios.

They are designed to track the overall performance of an equity market and do not trade in cash form.

Capitalization-weighted indices, which weight stocks by their market capitalization, are generally considered effective in tracking the performance of the overall market. Therefore, the statement that they are not generally considered better is incorrect.

Price-weighted indices give greater weight to shares trading at high prices, reflecting their price movements more heavily in the index.

Explanation:

The convexity of a portfolio of bonds is calculated as the value-weighted average convexity of the individual bonds. This considers the proportion of each bond's value in relation to the total portfolio value.

References Explanation based on portfolio management principles.

To hedge against the risk of decreasing interest rates, a bank should look to reduce the duration of its assets or increase the duration of its liabilities. Decreasing the duration of assets makes them less sensitive to interest rate changes, while increasing the duration of liabilities does the same on the liability side. The bank currently has both assets and liabilities with a duration of 10, so it should decrease the duration of its assets and/or increase the duration of its liabilities to hedge against decreasing interest rates.

Option A: Use of benchmarked data reflects similar data collection standards.

Incorrect. Benchmarking ensures that data is collected using similar standards, enhancing comparability and reliability.

Option B: External events are usually not of interest to senior management.

Incorrect. External events provide valuable insights and lessons that are often of significant interest to senior management.

Option C: If the external data is gathered from news sources, it may only reflect events that are interesting to the press.

Verified and correct. Data sourced from news can be biased towards more sensational events, potentially missing out on less newsworthy but equally important incidents.

Option D: They provide a source of data on what operational loss events will occur.

Incorrect. External databases provide historical data that can inform risk assessments but do not predict future events directly.