Quantile Regression Model for Measurement of Equity Portfolio Risk a Case Study of Nairobi Securities Exchange

Quantile regression provides a method of estimating quantiles from a conditional distribution density. It is achieves this by minimizing asymmetrically weighted sum of absolute errors thus partitioning the conditional distribution into quantiles. Lower conditional quantiles are of interest in estimation of Value-at-Risk because they indicate downward movement of financial returns. Current risk measurement methods do not effectively estimate the VaR since they make assumptions in the distribution tails. Financial data is sampled frequently leading to a heavier tailed distribution compared to a normal and student t distribution. A remedy to this is to use a method that does not make assumptions in the tail distribution of financial returns. Little research has been done on the usage of quantile regression in the estimation of portfolio risk in the Nairobi Securities Exchange. The main aim of this study was to model the portfolio risk as a lower conditional quantile, compare the performance of this model to the existing risk measurement methods and to predict the Value-at-Risk. This study presents summary of key findings and conclusion drawn from the study. From the fitted conditional quantile GARCH model 62.4% of VaR can be explained by past standard deviation and absolute residual of NSE 20 share index optimal portfolio returns. The fitted model had less proportion of failure of 7.65% compared to commonly used VaR models.