Different Risk Adjusted Performance Measures for Equity Mutual Funds : A Comparative Study of VAR and Traditional Measures

Traditional measures of performance evaluation are in vogue since long, however, Value at Risk (VaR) approaches are making their place in portfolio management industry from the last ten years. Value at Risk (VaR) approach focuses on the downside volatility of portfolio, thus making the investor clear about the maximum possible loss on his portfolio. In today's highly volatile environment, an investor is concerned more about the downside risk rather upward swing in the portfolio. He would hesitate to invest in a portfolio having more downward risk. Present paper makes an attempt to compare both the traditional and VaR performance measures and explore whether differences exist in ranking of funds using both the approaches. Results indicated that Sharpe ratio and Normal VaR results are same when used independently, while there is difference in results using Treynor and Jensen's Alpha