Practice Drills: Building a Real Time Risk Dashboard Specification

A hands-on drill course for senior quants, prop desk leads and aspiring systematic fund managers who will one day have to tell engineers exactly what a risk dashboard must do. Most risk screens fail not in the code but in the specification: metrics nobody defined precisely, feeds with no staleness rule, limits with no owner, and alerts that fire so often everyone mutes them. You work on one realistic book, a multi-strategy desk trading Nifty and Bank Nifty options, stock futures and cash equities on NSE, and write its dashboard specification drill by drill. You write the decision charter, map the book and its risk owners, define the metric hierarchy, and specify Greeks aggregation, intraday VaR and expected shortfall, margin monitoring against NSE Clearing requirements, and stress scenarios built from real Indian market days. Then you specify data feeds, latency budgets, reconciliation and failure modes, write a soft, hard and kill-switch limit framework with an escalation matrix, lay out the screens for three different users, write acceptance tests replayed against a historical stress day, and assemble a specification you can defend in front of a CIO and a CTO. Every drill uses Indian instruments, NSE contract specifications and INR figures.