Risk Mamagement

Hedging definition :

A strategy designed to reduce investment risk using call options, put options, short-selling, or futures contracts. A hedge can help lock in profits. Its purpose is to reduce the volatility of a portfolio by reducing the risk of loss.

Understanding

Corporations in which individual investors place their money have exposure to fluctuations in all kinds of financial prices, as a natural by-product of their operations. Financial prices include foreign exchange rates, interest rates, commodity prices and equity prices. The effect of changes in these prices on reported earnings can be overwhelming. Often, you will hear companies say in their financial statements that their income was reduced by falling commodity prices or that they enjoyed a windfall gain in profit attributable to the decline of the Canadian dollar.

One reason why companies attempt to hedge these price changes is because they are risks that are peripheral to the central business in which they operate. For example, an investor buys the stock of a pulp-and-paper company in order to gain from its management of a pulp-and-paper business. She does not buy the stock in order to take advantage of a falling Canadian dollar, knowing that the company exports over 75% of its product to overseas markets. This is the insurance argument in favour of hedging. Similarly, companies are expected to take out insurance against their exposure to the effects of theft or fire.

By hedging, in the general sense, we can imagine the company entering into a transaction whose sensitivity to movements in financial prices offsets the sensitivity of their core business to such changes. As we shall see in this article and the ones that follow, hedging is not a simple exercise nor is it a concept that is easy to pin down. Hedging objectives vary widely from firm to firm, even though it appears to be a fairly standard problem, on the face of it. And the spectrum of hedging instruments available to the corporate...