July 23rd, 2018, 4:12 pm
You have a trading book (TB), your diversified VaR is a single PnL vector covering the whole TB, your undiversified VaR is a single PnL vector for each "material" risk factor traded by all desks. For the whole VaR (TB) <= VaR (IR) + VaR(FX) + VaR(COM) + VaR (CSR ) + VaR (EQ). The IR, FX, COM, CSR, EQ are interest rates, FX, commodity's, credit spread risk and equity. If the PnL vectors are consistent with the assumption underlying VaR then the above inequality holds-this is called the coherence of VaR, otherwise, if your PnL vectors are not "Normal" or they are heavy-tailed or skewed then the above inequality fails and you need to take that into account.