Which of the following decisions need to be made as part of laying down a...

While conceptually VaR is a fairly straightforward concept, a number of decisions need to be made to select between the different choices available for the exact mechanism to be used for the calculations.

There ismore than one way to calculate returns. Absolute returns may be relevant for risk factors where the size of the movement is unrelated to its current value. For other risk factors, the returns might scale with the size of the existing value of the risk factor, eg equity prices. The right return definition needs to be adopted for each risk factor, therefore 'I' is a correct choice.

The risk analyst has a Choice 'b'etween parametric VaR, Monte Carlo, and historical simulation based VaR. 'II' therefore is one of the decisions that needs to be made (though historical simulation is the choice most often made).

The decision as to what to include in a portfolio is not a decision that is affected by choices made for VaR calculations. 'III' is therefore not a correctanswer.

There are multiple ways to calculate volatility - including decisions on how long back in time to go for the data, and whether volatility clustering needs to be accounted for using EWMA or GARCH. Therefore 'IV' is a correct answer.