I'm not sure what you're claiming here: that the authors used the wrong definition for VaR, or that they misread their own definition. Either way, they look cor

I'm not sure what you're claiming here: that the authors used the wrong definition for VaR, or that they misread their own definition. Either way, they look correct to me. VaR is a probabilistic upper bound on the loss: You can be 99% sure the loss is no greater than VaRβ, though it may be much less or (in the finance case) negative.