Investing term
What is Tail risk?
The risk of rare, extreme outcomes that sit far in the tails of the return distribution — events that 'shouldn't happen but do'.
Tail risk is the danger of rare, extreme events that sit far out in the "tails" of the distribution of outcomes — the crashes and shocks that statistical models say shouldn't happen but periodically do. Such events are infrequent but devastating, and they tend to strike when correlations spike and everything falls together. Diversification and not over-leveraging are the main defenses.
For example
A once-in-a-generation market collapse is tail risk — improbable in any given year, but capable of doing damage no normal model prepared for.
Tail risk is taught hands-on in Stage 17 — Portfolio-Level Risk.
See the lesson →