Applied Risk Management Strategies in the field of M&A

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,3, University of Applied Sciences Essen, course: International Finance, language: English, abstract: Risk minimization and return maximization is what managers, shareholders and even private investors aspire. However, risk and return are highly correlated so that investors have to manage this trade-off. Risk management is thus essential both for investment managers and company executives. Within portfolio management and corporate practice risk can be reduced by diversification.

In the "Risk Management" part Portfolio Theory - particularly Markowitz' Portfolio Selection - is to be introduced and the most common measures of risk i.e. volatility, covariance, correlation and the beta factor are to be presented.The next section refers to Mergers and Acquisitions and starts with a general intro-duction of the topic. Afterwards, M&A is to be related to diversification as a means of risk minimization. Finally, by the example of ThyssenKrupp, the theoretical assumptions of the first two parts are to be applied.