Online 2016-FRR Questions Video

Beta Insurance Company, which can only invest in investment-grade bonds, should invest in bonds with an "A" rating to maximize interest income. Investment-grade bonds are rated from AAA to BBB. While AAA bonds offer the highest credit quality, they also offer the lowest yield. Bonds rated A offer a good balance between credit quality and higher interest income compared to AAA and AA bonds.

Credit risk refers to the risk that a borrower will default on any type of debt by failing to make required payments. It is typically a form of performance risk in a contractual relationship, where one party is at risk of loss due to another party's inability to fulfill financial obligations. This is distinguished from market risk (related to market prices), liquidity risk (related to the availability of funds), and other operational risks that companies might face.

While diversifying a bank’s credit portfolio helps spread out credit risks, the goal in debt management is to minimize the impact of defaults, and default risk cannot be fully hedged away, meaning it will always exist for the credit holder or the person insuring against it.

However, it is incorrect to state that the value of loan exposure changes similarly to equity investments. Loan exposures are generally less volatile compared to equities, and their value is typically more stable.

The Black-Scholes model does not require discrete future stock prices as an input. Instead, it uses the current price of the underlying asset, the option’s strike price, time to maturity, risk-free interest rate, and the volatility of the underlying asset. The model assumes that the price of the underlying asset follows a continuous stochastic process and not discrete intervals.