Central Risk Book trading - how does it work and why do it?

We've had 2-3 smaller discussion here on central risk books - the idea seems to be that banks (mainly in Equities, but increasingly also FICC / cross-asset) aggregate risks from individual desks to more effectively hedge on a "whole bank" and netted basis (see e.g. http://tabbforum.com/opinions/who-will-win-tradin…)

**But how does it work in practice? **

Do banks mainly implement it as an “overlay” that aggregates risk, while nothing changes for individual desks? This would be easier to implement, but misses cost saving potential from cross-hedging trades in real-time between desks.

On the other hand offloading all risk from individual desks to a CRB straight away raises the questions a) how this is priced and b) why still have any separate books at all, if their risk is (immediately?) offloaded to someone else. How can you accurately attribute p&l in this case?

Any insights highly welcome.....

5 Comments
 

the central risk desk sees the firms aggregate risk position across all securities, simplified into a subset of risk points...and hedges when any one risk point gets too large.

i've seen the central risk manager walk over to the treasury desk and buy 20,000 10yr tsy futures (about 2 billion 10yr notes) for the central risk book (because the firm was net short 10yr yields by a sufficiently large amount for the risk desk to want to hedge some % of that risk).

just google it...you're welcome
 

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