I was searching the internet for job opportunities at small risk management/structured derivatives firms. I came across a company called Capital Market Risk Advisors (New York). It was started by Leslie Rahl who is apparently a very prominent person in the derivatives field. Has anyone heard of this company? If so, what do you know about them. I am undergraduate looking for a summer job and this company looks like the perfect complement to my interests and skills. Does anyone know of any other small risk management firms. I know that description is a little vague, but I'm looking for a small company that specializes in derivatives. I feel like a small firm would provide me with a more rigorous learning experience.

Interviewed there a few years ago. Wasn't overly impressed, and one of the people that interviewed me said they had lost a ton of people when one head consultant left and brought with him a third of the company.However, things may have changed.

My impression was that CMRA is crap also... On the website they make it sound like they invented the bread slicer. I have heard this kind of hard sell from people in the business who don't have a network. Besides the website, I never heard of them at all. I have spent time with the guys at RiskMetrics. I think they have some brains there, but I don't know if I'd work for them. The thing is, this is a bad business to be in right now. Nobody wants to spend the money, and some of the "solutions" they have provided have not worked as well as advertised. Some friends of mine were going to start a consultancy to do similar kinds of work, but based on conversations with people in the consulting biz we decided that the timing was not good.

krIn case of things like a storm or an air raid you just cover yourself and wait But do you really thing that Risk management business dont have a future? Or the future isnt as bright as it seemed to be in the recent past?My opinion is that RM has interest and future, since the evolution in the field has still to go on, the BIS directives (the key field driver) will keep on being renewed, and major loss events will always be there to ignite people's fears if not panic Regards Anthis

Yeah - mainly I was talking about the near term that business is bad for RM consulting.No, in case of a storm you hedge with weather derivatives, just like you buy life insurance for yourself and fire insurance for your home. Let the reinsurers cover the tail risk and blow themselves up.The reality is that the implementation costs for RM are gigantic, especially if you want to make the most of your diversification, and nobody is going to upgrade things on the capital economics alone right now. Also, the tighter the model, the more sensitive to the input data, and this in itself can be a major problem. The riskiest stuff is either never marked to market - so the timeseries is flat and shows no risk until you got blown up - or they mark it all over the place and you are driving your VaR with crap.My experience in the recent past is that people aren't using quantitative RM to make decisions... In particular, the focus is still on covering the risk of potential big loser positions rather than on optimising capital costs through diversification. That's definitely not to say there is no future in it long-term. On my first job interview ever, one of the senior guys at Susq alerted me to the fact that 25 years passed between Markowitz and the mutual fund explosion - that's an important thing to remember.