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Operational risk

The risk of losing money to a broken process rather than to a price move: a mistyped order, a dead terminal, an unreachable broker, a corporate action processed wrongly.

How to read the number

The one kind of risk a private investor controls directly — by checking order parameters, capping size and keeping a second route to the account.

When the metric lies

It is invisible in a performance report. A loss caused by the wrong quantity looks like a market loss and gets written off as bad luck, while the cause was procedural.

Also known as: process failure risk

Related terms