Failure of VAR as a risk metric

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/01/woefully-misleading-piece-on-value-at.html

Here's an excerpt

[in october] There were two daily changes of more than 10% during the month. With a standard deviation of daily changes of 1.032% (computed over the period 1971-2008) movements of such a magnitude can occur only once every 73 to 603 trillion billion years.