Combinatorial Risk Identification

Use This Skill When

• The user wants downside analysis that goes beyond one-factor stress tests.
• The thesis may fail only when two or three adverse events happen together.
• Financial leverage, operating leverage, customer concentration, or narrative dependency could create nonlinear downside.
• The goal is to identify scenarios where the downside is worse than the sum of the parts.

Required Inputs

• Company, position type, and relevant horizon for the risk analysis.
• Main standalone risk factors already known in the thesis.
• Key operating, financial, or valuation sensitivities.
• Capital structure, liquidity profile, customer or supplier concentration, and covenant context when relevant.
• Optional but useful: hedge candidates, correlation assumptions, and prior drawdown history.

Workflow

1. List the main standalone risks. Include demand, pricing, execution, leverage, regulation, competition, funding, or sentiment risks as relevant.
2. Identify plausible combinations. Pair or stack the risks that could interact rather than merely co-occur.
3. Trace the amplification path. Show how one shock worsens another through revenue, margin, cash flow, liquidity, or valuation.
4. Estimate severity. Explain why the combined downside is nonlinear, including second-order effects like financing stress, management reaction, or multiple compression.
5. Rank scenarios by plausibility and damage. Focus on a few scenarios that matter, not a long catalog.
6. Map monitoring and hedges. State what early warnings would show the combo risk is forming and what hedges could partially offset it.

Output Requirements

• Present combined scenarios, not just a list of individual risks.
• Explain mechanism, timing, and path dependency for each major scenario.
• Distinguish low-probability catastrophic risk from medium-probability compounding risk.
• Include whether the market is already pricing the combination.
• End with the single most dangerous interacting risk set.

Output Template

Quality Checks

• Scenarios involve interacting risks, not just multiple unrelated bad things.
• The amplification path is causal and time-ordered.
• The analysis says why downside is nonlinear.
• Plausibility and severity are both assessed.
• Monitoring points are specific enough to follow in real time.

Guardrails

• Do not create sensational tail risks with no credible transmission path.
• Do not ignore balance-sheet structure when downside depends on liquidity or refinancing.
• Avoid listing too many scenarios; focus on the few that could truly change the investment outcome.
• Do not assume all negative events are independent.
• If a risk is already heavily priced, say so instead of presenting it as variant insight.

Example Prompts

• Identify the two or three risk combinations that could create nonlinear downside for this stock.
• Go beyond single-factor stress testing and map interacting bear scenarios for this company.
• Show me the most dangerous combination of operating, financing, and valuation risks here.