Kuantile
Portfolio Stress Testing: What If You Held This Portfolio Through 2008?
The most honest question in risk measurement is: "What does this portfolio do when the bad day comes?" VaR gives you a statistical boundary; a stress test replays history. Kuantile runs your portfolio through 14 real crisis windows — from the 2008 global crisis to the 2025 tariff shock — and prices each scenario's bill for your current holdings in TRY.
The method: replaying history with today's weights
The logic is simple: take the daily returns inside a crisis window (say 20 February – 23 March 2020, the Covid crash), apply them to your current portfolio weights, and compound the period's impact. The "this stock didn't exist back then" problem is handled transparently: assets with no data in the window are excluded and listed clearly next to the result.
Why Türkiye-specific scenarios matter
Global tools usually test only S&P 500 crises. For a TRY-based portfolio, the 2018 Brunson crisis, the 2021 pre-KKM currency shock or the 2023 post-election adjustment are as instructive as Lehman — and in those windows, foreign-currency assets rise in TRY terms. Indeed, most mixed portfolios show a positive result for the "2021 currency crisis" scenario: the lira shock inflated the TRY value of their dollar assets. That is why your stress-test chart mixes red and blue bars; which crisis hurts you reveals your portfolio's character.
Custom simulation: pick your own window
If the preset scenarios aren't enough, Kuantile lets you choose any date range: "If I had entered 2022 with this portfolio, where would I have ended the year?" — answered with a day-by-day value curve that also visualises drawdown depth and recovery time.
How to read a stress test
- Look at your worst scenario: if that number became real, would you sleep? If not, your risk budget is exceeded.
- Look at the spread across scenarios: losing equally hard in every crisis means your portfolio depends on a single factor — usually a single country.
- Look at the excluded list: recent IPOs and young coins can't be tested in old scenarios; their tail risk is invisible in the table. Decide with that in mind.
The past is not the future; but it is the only realistic stage on which to rehearse for future crises.
Stress testing vs VaR
VaR measures the worst case on "normal days"; a stress test applies abnormal days — the disaster windows history has actually lived through — to your portfolio. The two do not replace each other; they complete each other. VaR is a probability statement ("1 day in 100"); a stress test is a conditional "what if" ("if the 2018 currency shock happened again"). Experienced investors read VaR as a daily risk budget and stress tests as a resilience exam.
Covered-value scaling
The most critical detail of an honest stress test: the scenario should be applied only to the part of your portfolio that has data during that crisis. For example, a crypto asset that did not exist in 2008 should not appear "loss-free" in a 2008 scenario — because there is no data for it in that period. That is why Kuantile shows a "covered value" ratio for each crisis window: what percentage of your portfolio the scenario could actually test. When coverage is low, the real impact may be larger than shown, and we state that caveat clearly next to the result.
Which crisis windows are used?
Instead of a single "bad day," Kuantile uses full crisis periods: the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the 2011 European debt crisis, the 2013 "taper tantrum," the 2018 Turkish currency shock, the 2020 Covid crash and the 2022 global rate-hike wave, among others. For each window, the cumulative return your portfolio would experience over that whole period is computed. So the question answered is not "how much do I lose in one day" but "what would my savings become if this crisis played out from start to finish" — with real data.
Stress-test your portfolio →