Accounting for Value at Risk in Financial Institutions' Portfolios

One of the most important developments in portfolio risk management in the 1990s was the increased use of Value at Risk (VaR). VaR has enjoyed a spectacular rise, from being largely unknown at the beginning of the 1990s, to prominence among financial institutions and, more recently, also in the corporate world. VaR is particularly useful because it measures aggregate portfolio risk by accounting for correlations between the individual risk factors in a portfolio.