Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the asymptotic distribution of the extreme daily stock returns in African stock markets over the period 1996-2007 and examine the implications for downside risk measurement. Design/methodology/approach – Extreme value theory methods are...

Risk management critically depends on the assumptions made about the distribution of stock returns. This paper applies extreme value methods to investigate the limiting distribution of the extreme returns of the NIKKEI225, FTSE100 and S&P500 indices as well as the indices of some of largest...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the asymptotic distribution of the extreme daily stock returns in African stock markets over the period 1996‐2007 and examine the implications for downside risk measurement. Design/methodology/approach – Extreme value theory methods are...