Rating: 
Summary: Welcome to the Brave New World
Review: About 1994,the first well-developed VAR system called Risk Metric system developed by the J.P. Morgan has totally changed the world about risk management. After several years and some influencial consequences like LTCM, people start to treat the risk more serious and more....And most important is ,we used to think that operation risk and liquidity risk are so hard to quantify and not the scope of the risk management.But now it has their ways.And any company which do business all around the world has to consider how to deal with the risk.The book first define and introduce us what kind of risk we face today and how we should think about it.Yes,it does not include severe math models. But every specified risk has its specific way to deal with,so the most important thing for us is to understand it thoroughly.The writer does provide us some insight for those risks.It also should be kept in mind that there is MODEL risk too....So perhaps that's way writer leave that to us....SO I still think it is a good one for us since it does contain all scopes about the risk we face today.And most important,we are not to control it but to manage it!
Rating:
Summary: A Good Read!
Review: As demonstrated by the bankruptcies of Britain's Barings Bank and Orange County, Calif., any organization that dabbles in derivatives investments needs sophisticated risk-assessment tools like "Value at Risk." The concept of VAR is simple - this single number shows just how much an institution's investment portfolio stands to lose. But calculating VAR is anything but simple, as author Phillippe Jorion's complex formulas and dense prose illustrate. Jorion does an admirable job of explaining exactly why Barings went broke, but his book is not for the uninitiated. Without skipping a beat, Jorion throws around impenetrable phrases like "generalized autoregressive heteroskedastic model." Nevertheless, we at getAbstract recommend this necessarily complex book to money managers who need to gauge the downside of sophisticated derivative investments; the rest of us can simply peruse its intriguing sagas of financial disaster, take an aspirin and lie down.
Rating: 
Summary: Shallow
Review: Based upon its marketing, this book over-promises and under-delivers. Yes, the author uses big words like "autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity." He also tosses around: "principal component analysis", "importance sampling" and "Quasi Monte Carlo." Anyone who needs to understand these concepts will be disappointed. The explanations are shallow ... often just a single paragraph. The reader is left with an elementary book that adds little to the original RiskMetrics document. If you are new to VAR, I recommend Dowd. For more experienced professionals (especially those who need to implement a VAR system) you will need to read the original literature.
Rating:
Summary: Still useful as reference but check out the competition
Review: Currently the VaR literature is cluttered with books all clamoring for your attention. Thus the potential student of the subject is blessed with being in a position to make a choice. The 'reader from New York' provided a good overview of the relevant literature. IMHO, this book tried to hit a balance between breadth of coverage (different models in practice) and depth (rigour), but the result is a compromise that leaves neither the student of the subject nor the practitioner satisfied. Since other reviewers have done such a good job dissecting this book, I will just concentrate on recommending the books that I feel are better values: For beginning students I feel Kevin Dowd's provides a good overview of the VaR literature in a clear and concise way. For pracitioners and more advanced risk mangement students, I HIGHLY recommend Glyn Holton's new Value-at-Risk Theory and Practice book. His approach is totally refreshing. Instead of starting at the top of the pyramide (the value-at-risk metrics), he starts out at the bottom. He breaks down VaR into its most basic elements. By providing a detailed explanation of difference between exposure and uncertainty, he introduces readers to the mathematical and probabilitistic background material needed to formulate the VaR measure (methodology) and the metrics (resulting VaR value). Both Kevin Dowd and Glyn Holton's presentations are organized and their writing are crisp and easily understandable. You won't go wrong with either book.
Rating: 
Summary: The New World Order - Value at Risk
Review: From the late 1970s onwards, a number of major financial institutions started work on internal models to measure and aggregate risks across the institution as a whole. The best known of these is JP Morgan's RiskMetrics system. This is said to have originated when the chairman, Dennis Weatherstone, asked his staff to give him a daily one-page report indicating risk and potential losses over the next 24 hours, across the firm's entire trading portfolio. To meet this demand, Morgan staff had to develop a system to measure risks across different trading positions over the whole institution, and then aggregate these risks into a single risk measure. The measure used was Value at Risk (VaR), or the maximum likely loss over the next trading day. The VaR was estimated from a system based on standard portfolio theory, using estimates of the standard deviations of and various correlations between the returns to different traded instruments. Other financial institutions were also working on their own VaR systems. Some of these were also based on portfolio theory, although there were major differences in subsidiary assumptions, use of data, procedures to estimate volatility and correlation, and many other 'details'. Since then, VaR systems have spread rapidly among securities houses and investment banks and, increasingly, among commercial banks, pension funds, other financial institutions, and non-financial corporates. Risk and uncertainty have dominated the financial landscape ever since the term 'globalisation' crept into every boardroom's major new goal. But after a continuous run of financial failures and risk-averse attitudes for nearly three decades, the world's major companies and financial institutions starting paying attention to what the academics knew all along - risk can be measured so long as history can be measured. Philippe Jorion's new book 'Value at Risk' offers a brief outline of the major components of his theory that has emerged onto the global financial scene in recent years. Much of the intense mathematical analysis techniques have been ommitted, perhaps due to the relatively adolescent and untested nature of this field. Hundreds of PhDs now focus on this very topic and the intricacies of the extent to which it is useful is still quite debatable. Philippe Jorion's treatment of VaR opens up the possibility of a radically new approach to enterprise-wide risk management (EWRM). This EWRM approach goes well beyond traditional risk management and requires a major transformation in the way that firms structure and govern themselves. This is not an action-packed hard-hitting bestseller, nor is it a triumph of literature. It is an objective portrayal of a financial analysis technique. It doesn't promise to keep you awake at night, but it does promise many firms the opportunity to save a lot of money (and thus get you a promotion!).
Rating:
Summary: Good Book for sophisticated investment analyst
Review: Good Book for sophisticated investment analyst
Rating:
Summary: PR for VaR
Review: I began using this book as part of my audit job at a major trading/investment firm. I'm currently an FRM candidate, and this is the FRM-recommended book for a bulk of readings on VaR methods and implementation. The first few chapters are a general survey of the risk management world, and informative by themselves. Unfortunately, that's where it stops. As the book starts to dive deeper into VaR, the ideas quickly become disjointed, incoherent and difficult to follow - I have a mathematical background, but it is very frustrating to have to read repeatedly to try and decipher entire sections of the book, especially the whole chapter on backtesting. While VaR as a concept is easy to grasp, the devil is very largely in the details, which this book fails to present in any organized way. So, it is more like an advertisement for the idea of VaR-based risk management, but certainly not a practical guide.
Rating:
Summary: not helpfull at all!
Review: I believe that this book is not at all helpfull since it does not explain thouroughly the material. It just provides the reader with tables and calculations that sometimes are not easily understood. Moreover it refers to important material such as the calculation of VAR in SWAPS and FRAs without really explaining!!!
Rating:
Summary: Great book, Great teacher!!!
Review: I had the privilege to take the Value At Risk course by Prof. Jorion himself. As part of the course, we had to read most of the book. It is thick book, very well written, and I feel it is suitable not only for finance students, but to anybody who wants to learn about risk valuation. It doesn't deal with high mathematics, but still presents the material in a concise way, easy to understand, and to easy apply.
I recommend!!!
Rating: 
Summary: I did not like it at all!
Review: I think you don't need so many pages to explain the ideas in the book. Too long and too repetitive. You better read some other book about Risk management that talks about VaR in a more concise and enjoyable way. I think this book is full of wind.
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