Your risk, in one number

What does a bad month
actually cost you?

Photograph your broker statement. The agent reads all twelve holdings, works out what you could lose on the worst day in twenty, and tells you in one sentence what to do about it — in Hong Kong dollars, not percentages.

See my risk in dollars Read a risk alert

Every figure on this page comes from one illustrative sample portfolio of twelve stocks. It is not your portfolio, not market data, and not advice.

Sample output. A real brief arrives before the market opens.

Do you have proper risk management tools?

The institutions across town already knows its risk number.

Every hedge fund, bank and fund manager has a quant team and a risk system behind it. Before eight in the morning they know what the book could lose today, how hard it moves with the markets, and exactly how many futures to sell to make that smaller. However, for retail investors like you, do you feel disadvantaged if you only have a free charting app and a statement that arrives once a month.

Twelve holdings. HK$329,600. A monthly statement nobody reads closely, and a broker app that colours today green or red. That is the entire risk infrastructure of most retail investors in Hong Kong — and it measures the one thing already known. Yesterday’s profit and loss is history. Risk is the part that has not happened yet.

The gap is not intelligence. A taxi driver who has held the same seven stocks for fifteen years understands his companies better than most analysts do. The gap is instrumentation. Nobody ever handed him the number.

Until the weather turns

Risk is invisible until it is not

In a rising market nobody asks what they are carrying. Everybody looks clever and the question seems pedantic. This is what the last decade of Hong Kong trading felt like from the inside.

Described in words, not figures. We would rather write “a long slide through the autumn” than print a market statistic we cannot stand behind.

The wall of worry

Risk monitoring is a seatbelt.

Photograph the statement. Understand the risk.

What you get, in plain language

Five things the institutional world charges a desk for. None of them ask you to learn a spreadsheet, a formula, or a single piece of jargon. Every panel below is live — touch it.

Snap your statement

Open the app, point it at the monthly statement your broker emails you, and take a photo. That is the whole of the onboarding.

The agent reads the document — English or Traditional Chinese — pulls out every stock code, quantity and cost, and builds the holdings table. Eleven seconds for a twelve-line statement. Where it is unsure of a row it flags that row and asks, rather than guessing quietly into your risk number.

  • No broker password. Ever. You photograph your own document.
  • The image is parsed, then deleted. We keep the numbers, not the paper.
  • Blurry or unreadable? Type the twelve lines in by hand instead.
Statement scan Looping demo
Holdings read from the sample statement
Code Name Shares Value

99.2% read confidence · 11 seconds · +6 more rows

The photo becomes a portfolio. You never type a stock code.

Your risk, as one number

The banks call it FH-HVaR. You can call it “the worst month”.

Value at Risk answers one question: on all but the worst days, how much do I lose? Read it as a sentence rather than a formula — on 95 days out of 100 the loss is smaller than this; on the worst day in twenty, about this much.

The “filtered” part is what makes it honest. Five hundred days of history are not equally useful. A quiet week years ago says less about tomorrow than the turbulence of the last fortnight, so the model measures how rough the market has been recently and widens the estimate for today to match. Right now that filter is running 14% above calm-market level. In a placid market the number shrinks. It is meant to.

  • Three confidence levels, because one number is never a whole answer.
  • Shown in HKD against your book, and as a share of it.
  • Recalculated daily. It moves when the market moves, not when you remember to look.
Worst-case figure FH-HVaR · 500-day window

The same number, said twice

95% one-month FH-HVaR Nineteen months in twenty, you lose less than HK$42,200.

Market filter 1.14×

Calm 1.00× Now Stressed 2.00×

Change the confidence level. The number moves; the sentence stays readable.

Maximum drawdown

The deepest valley your money has ever sat in — and how long you were down there.

Drawdown is the distance from a high point to the low that followed it. It is what you would have lost by buying at the top and selling at the worst possible moment, which is very close to what frightened people actually do.

This is the figure that makes investors give up. Not the annual return in the brochure — the long stretch in the middle where the statement got shorter every quarter and selling felt like the only adult option. In the sample book the valley was −27.4% deep, about −HK$90,300, and it lasted two and a half years. Meet that number on a calm afternoon and it stops being a reason to panic-sell in the middle of it.

Equity curve · 72 months Indexed to the benchmark
The shaded valley is the maximum drawdown — −27.4% peak to trough, and 30 months to climb back to where it started.

A second, shallower valley sits further right. Drawdowns are not an event. They are the weather.

When the Hang Seng sneezes

Beta is how hard you move when the index moves. This book runs at 1.24×.

One means you move with the market. Above one means you move more. At 1.24, a 5 per cent fall in the Hang Seng should cost about 6 per cent — roughly HK$20,400 here. That is not a prediction. It is the shape of what you already own.

We measure against three indices rather than one, because a Hong Kong portfolio rarely behaves like the headline number. This book leans harder on Hang Seng TECH than on the Hang Seng Index, and the six financial names inside it answer to interest rates whether or not the index does.

Beta against the index 36 trading days
Each dot is one trading day. The fitted line runs at 1.24× — steeper than the dashed one-for-one line, so down days cost more than the index loses.
Beta and correlation of the sample portfolio against three indices
Index Beta Correlation

Does your portfolio catch a cold when the Hang Seng sneezes? This is how badly.

Suppose the market breaks

You do not have to imagine the scenario

We already built it. Twenty-four of them — a decade of real Hong Kong market weather, plus the things that have not happened yet.

A stress test runs your actual holdings through a named piece of bad news and reports what survives. Not a generic “market down 10 per cent”. The currency peg coming under pressure. A developer defaulting and taking the banks with it. A short-seller report on the single largest position. Three sessions lost to a typhoon.

Read down the impact column. Some scenarios cost far less than you would guess — the oil shock is one, because the CNOOC holding quietly does useful work in exactly that weather. Others cost a third of the book. Both answers are worth having before the morning they are needed.

Scenario library 24 shocks on file
Twenty-four pre-built scenarios with their modelled impact on the sample portfolio, worst first
Scenario Index shock Your impact Severity

Severity is written as a word beside the colour, because colour alone is not an answer.

One sentence every morning

This is not a dashboard you have to learn.

It is an agent that watches a portfolio the way a good watchdog watches a gate — quietly, every day, and loudly only when something matters. Most mornings it says nothing needs doing, which is the point. Here is what one of them looked like.

Vision 07:42 · Friday 14 November HSI futures pointing 0.4 per cent lower

One note a day, before the market opens. It can be switched off.

The price of a lunch

Priced for the person it is actually for.

Everything the institutional world charges a desk for, for the price of lunch in Central.

Talk to a person

Tell us what you are trying to find out.

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