The reconstruction of the VaR of Amaranth’s positions on August 31, 2006 was high, but cannot entirely explain Amaranth’s losses in September 2006 unless one designates the Amaranth collapse as a 5 standard deviation event.35 It appears Amaranth’s traders and senior management were well aware of a VaR number similar to the one produced in this paper. It seems that they were willing to take this amount of risk given the expected return they hoped to achieve. With regards to their liquidity risk, while the traders were very aware of the size of their positions, it is not clear that senior management in Greenwich really understood the extent of it. First, Amaranth’s risk management with regard to liquidity did not explicitly specify position limits as a percentage of volume traded or open interest on the exchanges, so risk of this type may not have been on senior management’s radar in an explicit way. Second, Amaranth allowed Brian Hunter and his trading team to move to Calgary without any risk management team (FERC Report, p. 18-19). Third, Amaranth was slowly increasing the size of their natural gas positions over the summer of 2006.