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 | | Value-at-Risk: Theory and Practice by Glyn A. Holton ISBN-10: 9780123540102 ISBN-10: 0-12-354010-0 ISBN-13: 9780123540102 ISBN-13: 978-0-12-354010-2 Hardcover 2003-03 Academic Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Value-at-risk (VaR) is a measure of market risk that has been widely adopted since the mid-1990s for use on trading floors. This is the first advanced book published on VaR. It describes how to design, implement, and use scalable production VaR measures on actual trading floors. It takes readers from the basics of VaR to the most advanced techniques, many of which have never been published in book form. Practical, detailed examples are drawn from markets around the world, including: Euro deposits, Pacific Basin equities, physical coffees, and North American natural gas. Real-world challenges relating to market data, portfolio mappings, multicollinearity, and intra-horizon events are addressed in detail. Exercises reinforce concepts and walk readers step-by-step through computations. Sophisticated techniques are fully disclosed, including: quadratic ("delta-gamma") methods for nonlinear portfolios, variance reduction (control variates and stratified sampling) for Monte Carlo VaR measures, principal component remappings, techniques to "fix" estimated covariance matrices that are not positive-definite, the Cornish-Fisher expansion, and orthogonal GARCH. * First advanced text on Value-at-Risk * Practical, detailed examples drawn from markets around the world * Exercises reinforce concepts and walk readers step-by-step through computations | ||
Reviews | ||
Most of it cannot be found in other VaR books Holton presented VaR in a very accessible way. With the exercises provided online, whoever serious about VaR will be greatly benefit from it. The more times you read, the more you will be enlighten. Do with the reading and exercises at the same time if you stuck with any content, it helps! Monte Carlo is well presented. For EVT and Garch, can be easily found elsewhere, but what you can learn here is hardly found elsewhere. | ||
The Bible I work in finance as a software developer. I had done some work with risk management and had read Jorion's book and Butler's. When I had to do my own VaR implementation, a colleague recommended Holton's book. It is amazing. The level of domain expertise is above anything else out there. It is sophisticated and well written. I thought I knew about VaR before reading Holton, but I didn't really. Now I know about VaR. I noticed that someone has been posting negative reviews of the book here on Amazon. Those reviews are blatantly dishonest. I assume they are posted by a jealous competing author. Holton is the bible. | ||
Not helpful This book looks good only at first sight. However, try and solve the exercises and you see there is more to VaR than the author wants us to believe. This book is too incoherent to be of any use. Just take a look at the index: A lot of things are introduced but are never used again later in the book. This makes me wonder why they were introduced at all. Some examples from the index: Hessian, GARCH, Markov process, etc. The biggest fault however in my opinion is the treatment of Monte Carlo, the most essential tool for VaR calculation: Condensed in roughly 30 pages compared to roughly 110 pages for mathematical preliminaries and probability cannot cater to the same audience. | ||
A good book on VaR A good book on VaR, but finally lost its charming. Incomplete and solved cases in a pathetic manner. Theory: 80%, Practice: 10%, pathetic exercises 10%. This book doesn?t reflect its complete main purpose: theory and practice. I would choose mastering Value at Risk by Cormac Butler and Value At Risk by Jorion. My rate is 2 stars. Do it again. Don?t forget solved cases in spreadsheets. | ||
A Smart Book There are plenty of elementary books on VaR. This is an exception. It is a smart book for practitioners. It covers practicalities such as data cleaning, day counts and modeling intra-horizon events. It explains cutting-edge theory such as quadratic VaR, variance reduction techniques and holdings remappings. It introduces all the mathematics you need to know. The prerequisites are modest -- about the same as for John Hull's book "Futures, Options and Other Derivatives." Holton does use some more advanced concepts, such as the Cornish-Fisher expansion or moment generating functions. He explains all of these before using them. Actually, he goes out of his way to make the mathematics accessible, devoting several chapters to explaining essential concepts. There are chapters on probability, statistics, the Monte Carlo Method, etc. Later in the book, whenever technical concepts come up, you will find an accompanying reference to an explanation in one of the earlier mathematics chapters. In this regard, the book is wonderfully self contained! The author does make extensive use of matrix notation. This may take some getting used to if your background in linear algebra is limited, but it is worth it. Formulas that would be extremely complicated become simple when expressed with matrices. The author's notation is intuitive and used consistently throughout the book. If you see a symbol on page 10, it is going to mean exactly the same thing on page 310. If you are serious about value-at-risk, this is the book to read. | ||