Nonlinear Risk Systems: Tail Events, Convexity, Path Dependency, and Stress Propagation in Trading Systems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798246580356)

Nonlinear Risk Systems is a practitioner's field manual for the risks that do not scale nicely. The ones that hide in the tails, compound through feedback loops, and only reveal themselves when your portfolio, your leverage, and the market's microstructure interact in the wrong sequence. This book explains why "normal" risk models break precisely when you need them most, and how to think in convexity, regime shifts, and stress propagation instead of smooth vol and stable correlations.

You will learn how tail events emerge from seemingly reasonable assumptions, how path dependency turns small differences in timing into radically different outcomes, and how convex exposures (options, leverage, stop mechanics, liquidity constraints) can either protect you or accelerate losses. Using real-world trading system logic rather than ivory-tower math, James Preston shows how stress travels across instruments, venues, and constraints, creating cascades: margin calls, liquidity gaps, execution slippage, correlation spikes, and forced de-risking that feeds back into price impact.

Inside, you'll build an intuition for nonlinear risk surfaces, identify hidden convexities, map dependency networks, and design stress tests that actually break systems in simulation before markets break them in production. You'll also learn how to architect portfolios and execution workflows for robustness: volatility-aware sizing, convex hedging frameworks, kill-switch logic, drawdown governors, and scenario libraries that reflect discontinuities, gaps, and clustered volatility.

If you trade systematic strategies, options, leveraged portfolios, or multi-asset books, Nonlinear Risk Systems gives you the mental models and tools to stop treating tails as rounding errors and start designing trading systems that survive the regimes that end careers.