Description: In this Chairman’s corner column, Tom Anichini suggests several sources for finding investment related continuing education content. In addition to archived SOA presentations and recordings, other potential sources include pertinent academic and practitioner periodicals, blogs, podcasts, conference and seminar websites, and networks of academic publications and working papers.

Description: 2013 Investment Contest challenges section members to assemble an asset portfolio which will prevail in one of three risk/return metrics.

Description: Chronically low interest rates are a reflection of macroeconomic trends. Care must be exercised in making assumptions regarding mean reversion.

Description: This article explores the market volatility of 2008, and addresses the following question: “was the market behaving inefficiently as appeared to be the case in 2008, or was there something truly rational going on, which for most people was hard to see?”

Description: Describes how the mantra of 'tax cuts will pay for themselves" along with the political unwillingness to cut spending (extant since the 1980s), has led to this increasing debt problem in the U.S., reaching $17 trillion at time of writing. Other countries are behaving in a similar fashion, and it can be only a matter of time before the globe may reach another crisis, this time based on excessive government debt coupled with fewer interested investors.

Description: Provides the results of the April - Sept 2015 contest organized by the section.

Description: This article discusses index separate accounts and their use by insurance companies for group pension clients, including product design and regulatory developments.

Description: The purpose of the article is to highlight how a person or organization can excel in both a highly-competitive expert-driven environment and one where the environment is less so. One should focus on what can be done well and delegate the remaining tasks to those who are better at performing them. One should understand the environment they are operating in, how it impacts them, and how it may change through time. The principles have application to investment management, investment performance, organizational performance, business development, career progression and economics.

Description: The article contemplates whether there is heightened sensitivity towards how investment activity is portrayed and described.

Description: The author discusses the review of a recent 2001 Wall Street Journal’s semiannual survey of economists’ forecasts, starting by asking if there is a simple way to summarize the results and to extract a consensus forecast, and from this extraction, determine when an individual forecast is significantly different from that of the consensus.This article is reprinted with permission. It last ran in the Jan. 10, 2001 issue of The La Jolla Economics newsletter.