October 23rd, 2004, 12:24 pm
Value-at-Risk is an approach to measuring risk. The basic idea is to look at the probability distribution of profit and loss over a fixed horizon.The most popular metric for expressing VaR is a quantile of that distribution.The first idea has become so popular that lots of people have forgotten there are alternatives. To these people there's no need to use the term "VaR" for it, it's just "risk." Instead, they use "VaR" to mean the second idea, summarizing a distribution by a quantile.The answer to your question is "VaR" shouldn't mean quantile, but it is often used that way.
Last edited by
Aaron on October 22nd, 2004, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.