The present paper focuses on three questions: (i) Are heavy tails a relevant feature of the distribution of BUND futures returns? (ii) Is the tail behaviour constant over time? (iii) If it is not, can we use the tail index as an indicator for financial market risk and does it add value in...

The main objective of this paper is to survey and evaluate the performance of the most popular univariate VaR methodologies, paying particular attention to their underlying assumptions and to their logical flaws. In the process, we show that the Historical Simulation method and its variants can...