Chicago-based Northern Trust has enhanced its online risk reporting tools to provide additional risk attribution and value at risk (VaR) analysis capabilities.

The enhancements are aimed at assisting users in their analyses by providing an integrated view of historical risk and performance data. As such, the tools’ existing “ex-ante” (forecasted) functions have been supplemented with “ex-post” (historical) calculations.

Northern Trust’s Risk Attribution model is designed to allow clients to assess the risk and return trade-off which investment decisions entail – considerations which must be at the forefront of wealth managers’ minds following the stunning losses portfolios have suffered over the past year. The addition of ex-post capabilities builds on the model’s performance attribution tools for the analysis of tracking error, information ratio and standard deviation in a form consistent with return attribution, the bank said.

Meanwhile, the VaR tool’s ex-post capability calculates reports on historical risk measures using a range of confidence levels, allowing clients to focus on the tails of a portfolio’s return distribution.

“Clients are increasingly looking for detailed analysis of the sources of their portfolio risk, and these latest enhancements are part of Northern Trust’s continuing strategy to provide an integrated set of ex-post and ex-ante risk and performance capabilities,” said Ian Castledine, global head of Investment Risk product, for asset servicing, at Northern Trust.