The measurement of risk, the language of risk, seemingly even the definition of risk itself—all these can vary dramatically across assets and across the levels of a firm. Traders may talk about dollar value of an 01, beta for an equity security or the pandora’s box of delta, gamma, theta, and vega for an option. A risk manager assessing the overall risk of a firm might discuss the VaR, or expected shortfall, or lower semivariance. Nonetheless, all these terms tackle the same question in one way or another: What is the variability of profits and losses (P&L)? This is as true for a commercial bank, an investment firm or a portfolio manager as for a trading desk.

Modern risk measurement is a quantitative field, there is no avoiding the statistics, the mathematics, the models, the computer technology and the numbers. This is were we come in, a team with the technical expertise and cadre to quantify and communicate risk, making the known and unknown risks easy to see, understand and compare.