Chapter 22 Value at Risk

Chapter 19 examined measures such as delta, gamma, and vega for describing different aspects of the risk in a portfolio of derivatives. A financial institution usually calculates each of these measures each day for every market variable to which it is exposed. Often there are hundreds, or even thousands, of these market variables. A delta–gamma–vega analysis, therefore, leads to a very large number of different risk measures being produced each day. These risk measures provide valuable information for the financial institution’s traders. However, they do not provide a way of measuring the total risk to which the financial institution is exposed.

Value at Risk (VaR) is an attempt to provide a single number summarizing ...

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