Description: 1993 SOA Annual Meeting, New York. This session discussion is about asset prepayment assumptions for regulatory cash-flow testing. Topics included: 1. The prepayment characteristics of corporate bonds with embedded options. 2. How much prepayment and redemption activity has taken place within that market. 3. Techniques that corporate bond issuers have used to retire debt prior to maturity. 4. The investment implications. 5. The impact that prepayments have on MBS price and return performance. 6. The challenges of prepayment modeling.

Description: 1994 SOA Spring Meeting, Orlando. The first report on a study of bond investment results of life insurance companies with high-yield bond portfolios was presented at this session. The study, covering years 1986-92, was commissioned by the Society of Actuaries Ufe Insurance Practice Research Committee.

Description: Reviews book entitled An Introduction to Risk and Return from Common Stocks by Richard Brealey. The book provides a description of the stock market, as seen through the eyes of the statistician.

Description: This guide lists literature sources that an actuary can use to gain knowledge on investments and asset/liability management. It can be viewed as a preliminary road map for the actuary seeking direction to enhance his or her knowledge in these areas. The emphasis of this guide is on fixed-income securities.

Description: This article discusses the magnitude and impact of the subprime crisis.

Description: This discussion is on asset management for an insurance company, including issues of varying investment strategies for different product lines through various asset segmentation approaches, management of the assets supporting surplus, and asset/liability risk management considerations

Description: This paper describes a streamlined procedure for allocating investment income which permits the application of a single current investment-year interest rate, together with an averaged rollover rate, to an adjusted asset base to give essentially the same results as the traditional investment-year method. It also includes a discussion of the paper. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1976, Vol. 28.

Description: This article discusses equity risk premium, what it is, how it should be measured, if a constant risk premium provides the best model and what are reasonable expectations for the future.

Description: 1994 SOA Spring Meeting, Orlando. In this session panelists discussed new investment options including an overview of traditional assets, an asset-allocation framework, specific markets' risk characteristics and some implications for risk-based capital for asset management. The discussion included derivatives, fixed income alternatives, and equity alternatives.

Description: 1994 SOA Spring Meeting, San Francisco. In this interactive presentation, the panel fielded investment questions from the audience. Prepared and audience questions included: 1. What is the FLUX measure? What's it supposed to do for regulators and insurance companies? 2. What sort of things really went on that caused the difficulties at Executive Life, First Capital, and Mutual Benefit? 3. What are some examples of hedges that you would recommend for a $100 million SPDA portfolio to try and combat the effects of rising interest rates? 4. Given the changes that experienced in interest rates, what's that been doing to the durations of typical interest-sensitive liabilities? 5. What do you do to hedge with derivatives or whatever if interest rates are going down? 6. What level of asset-liability matching do companies usually target? How do regulators view this?