The Concentration Risk Indicator: Raising the Bar for Financial Stability and Portfolio Performance Measurement

TL;DR

The paper introduces the concentration risk indicator (CRI), a novel, simple metric adapted from the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, designed to assess risk concentration in portfolios and enhance financial stability and risk management practices.

Contribution

It presents the CRI as a new, adaptable risk measure applicable across various sectors and asset classes, including crypto, addressing limitations of existing methods.

Findings

CRI effectively quantifies concentration risk in crypto portfolios.

CRI correlates with other risk metrics and provides clear signals.

Application of CRI can improve risk assessment and decision-making.

Abstract

We have developed a novel risk management measure called the concentration risk indicator (CRI). The CRI has been created to address drawbacks with prevailing methodologies and to supplement existing methods. Modified and adapted from the Herfindahl-Hirschman (HH) index, the CRI can give a single numeric score that can be helpful to evaluate the extent of risks that arise from holding concentrated portfolios. We discuss how the CRI can become an indicator of financial stability at any desired aggregation unit: regional, national or international level. We show how the CRI can be easily applied to insurance risk and to any product portfolio mix. The CRI is particularly applicable to the current facet of the decentralized terrain, wherein the majority of the wealth is restricted to a small number of tokens. We calculate and report the CRI -- along with other risk metrics -- for individual assets and portfolios of crypto assets using a daily data sample from January 01, 2019 until August 10, 2022. The CRI is an example of developing metrics that can useful for sending concise yet powerful messages to the relevant audience. This tactic -- which can be described as marketing the benefits of any product or service by using concepts from multiple disciplines -- of creating new metrics goes further beyond the use of metrics to evaluate marketing efficacy. The simplicity of our metric -- and the intuitive explanations we have provided for the CRI -- makes it straightforward to properly articulate a strong -- clear and positive -- signal as part of marketing campaigns. The development -- and implementation -- of new risk management metrics will have greater impact when a wider rigorous risk management process has been established. We discuss several topics related to bringing about more improved risk management across all types of institutions and assets.