Anti-cyclical versus risk-sensitive margin strategies in central clearing

We examine the effects of different margin strategies on the loss distribution of a clearing house during various crises of different stock price trends, volatility expectations, bid-ask spreads, and funding liquidity. We simulate a hypothetical clearing house active on the US stock futures market 2008-2015, investigating its micro-level stability. We find that it might be optimal to replace the strict risk-sensitive margin strategy by more anti-cyclical ones. The extreme anti-cyclical strategy (full smoothing), however, was suboptimal on this sample. Our results may help institutions elaborate their margin strategies to develop risk management systems in line with new regulations.