Monte-Carlo Estimations of the Downside Risk of Derivatives Portfolios

We simulate the performances of a standard derivatives portfolio to evaluate the relevance of benchmarking in terms of downside risk reduction. The simulation shows that benchmarking always leads to significantly more severe losses in average than those generated by letting the portfolio reach the end of a given horizon. Moreover, switching from a 0-correlation across underlyings to a very mild form of correlation significantly increases the probability of reaching the downside benchmark before maturity, whereas adding more correlation does not significantly increase this figure.