Philippe Jorion's FRM Handbook retold as a 42-part blog series covering market, credit, operational, and regulatory risk for practitioners and exam candidates.
The Financial Risk Manager Handbook Plus Test Bank (6th edition) by Philippe Jorion is the reference text behind GARP’s FRM certification. Published by Wiley in 2011 (ISBN 978-0-470-90401-5), it spans quantitative methods, financial products, market and credit risk models, operational risk, Basel capital rules, and investment risk management. Jorion wrote it as exam prep, but it became a desk manual for risk teams worldwide.
This blog series walks through all 30 chapters as conversational retellings. Each post covers the core ideas, the formulas that actually matter, and honest commentary on what holds up years after the 2008 credit crisis. Split chapters (probability, bonds, options, multivariate VaR, credit structures, Basel, hedge funds) get extra posts where the source material runs long.
The book is dense and dated in places (pre-Dodd-Frank, pre-Basel III finalization). But the framework still works: measure risk at the portfolio level, separate expected from unexpected loss, stress what models assume away, and treat correlation as a first-class risk factor. If you are studying for the FRM, building a risk library, or just want to understand how banks think about tail events, this series is a readable map before you open the 700-page original.
Start with the series intro or jump to any chapter post. The closing post sums up what stuck after reading the full book.