Liquidity risk (in the sense of asset exit risk) is warranted on investments that may not be easily divested at the going market or fair-value price. I am looking at a portfolio of private assets which is a mix of real estate, infrastructure and private equity. These consist of a handful of direct investments in real assets (not a fund of funds) and so are highly illiquid and exit/liquidity risk is a primary concern.
My goal is to get a metric indicating whether the liquidity risk of the private asset portfolio as a whole is deterioriating or improving
However, measuring this exit risk precisely is difficult. One method I've seen discussed is to apply real option pricing theory. Suppose a put option existed that gave us the right to sell the real asset at any time. The premium that we'd pay for this option would provide one measure of the "cost" of illiquidity, and could be aggregated for a portfolio of direct investments to give an overall metric for liquidity risk.
I've seen a few papers that briefly suggest this approach, but I haven't seen it actually applied. If it is a valid approach, how would it be practically applied, and how can the characteristics of real assets be substituted into option valuation methods? If there are some pitfalls that invalidate this approach, are there better ways for gauging this risk?
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