The normal inverted gamma mixture or generalized Student t and the symmetric double Weibull, as well as their logarithmic counterparts, are proposed for modeling some loss distributions in non-life insurance and daily index return distributions in financial markets. For three specific data sets, the overall goodness-offit from these models, as measured simultaneously by the negative log-likelihood, chi-square and minimum distance statistics, is found to be superior to that of various “good” competitive models including the log-normal, the Burr, and the symmetric α-stable distribution. Furthermore, the study justifies on a statistical basis different important models of financial returns like the model of Black-Scholes (1973), the log-Laplace model of Hürlimann (1995), the normal mixture by Praetz (1972), the symmetric α-stable model by Mandelbrot (1963) and Fama (1965), and the recent double Weibull as limiting geometric-multiplication stable scheme in Mittnik and Rachev (1993). As an application, the prediction of one-year index returns from daily index returns is discussed.
