Cash flow-at-risk in publicly traded non-financial firms in Turkey : an application in defense companies

People have always evaluated qualitative factors as black boxes so far. Academicians have put much effort to understand and explain these black boxes. The improvements in technology, therefore in social sciences, ease these efforts considerably. Risk is one of the qualitative factors, which drew people’s attention. As a result, some forecasting techniques have been developed to know the unknown. Risk means both profits and losses for people and firms. That is why, risk should be managed to exploit the profits and avoid the losses. Value-at-risk relying on the data about liquid assets was proposed to assist financial firms such as banks, insurance companies, and investment companies to manage their risks. Contrary to financial firms, non-financial firms have more illiquid assets. These firms used value-at-risk to manage their risks initially but the practical results were not satisfactory. Therefore value-at-risk should be revised and adjusted to the non-financial firms. Consequently cash-flow-at-risk concept was proposed to manage risk in non-financial firms. This study aims to apply cash flowat-risk concept in publicly traded non-financial firms in Turkey. The data drawn from financial statements were used because they helped to quantify risk in non-financial firms. The results of the study reveal that the proposed model can be used to asses all publicly traded non-financial firms’ risk exposure in Turkey for the next quarter