Description: Summary of Investment Council sponsored meetings as 2015 annual meeting

Description: Summarizes a research paper considering insurer performance during the financial crisis, with actions and circumstances that improved results highlighted.

Description: The article focuses on the need to develop a strategy for investing surplus resulting from the buildup of significant excess capital. The author discusses three principles on which a company can base its surplus investment strategy, including the risk/return preference of the client, attribution of surplus to the products and an investment strategy based on all company risks.

Description: Discussion of projected stochastic reserve results under PBR for ULSG product under different baseline projection scenarios and different investment strategies.

Description: Insurance companies utilize derivatives in a variety of ways to manage and mitigate risks that are inherent in their investment or liability portfolios. They can be characterized by three main features: medium long-term duration; large volumes; and significant market risk exposure. Given the persistent low interest rate environment across the curve since the 2008 financial crisis, large companies need to hedge their liabilities, as illustrated by the significant recent increase from $786 billion as of fiscal year 2010 to $1,885 billion as of FY 2014 by insurance companies.As the Variable Annuities (VA) guarantees embedded within those liabilities hold a strong convex risk profile with respect to the underlying stock, VA carriers need to buy some convex hedge assets such as options to match the liability risk profile to improve hedge effectiveness, implying the growing cost of hedging. Such market impact of the quantity on the cost of hedging is further magnified in the recent period with the short-lived, but sharp transitions from low volatility to high volatility, when market volatility suddenly increases, even when there were no well-known fundamental catalysts. This partially stems from the growing managed volatility funds embedded within VA ($bn 400).VA carriers willing to trade a large quantity of options will see such market impact as an important dilemma, as the cost of placing one large order to close position will be far greater than the sum of infinitely small orders differed in time. In that context, managing market impact requires introducing an explicit market impact function, the influence of which the agent will try to minimize. The effect on hedge asset prices significantly depends on whether there is or not significant delta hedging activity. In case of no significant delta hedging activity, the risk appetite has a significant influence on the optimal execution strategy. If there is significant delta hedging activity, the optimal trading involve

Description: This articles explores the notion of whether the old rules and paradigms of investment strategy and caution may no longer be applicable in today’s financial environment, because things were “different this time.”

Description: Discusses how surplus should be defined, how it should be invested, and how the rating agencies may respond to various approaches. From the 1987 Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 13, No. 3.

Description: This presentation is a panel discussion from the 1991 Annual Meeting of the Society of Actuaries, held October 20-23 in Toronto. Citing the current environment of recent insurance company insolvencies, bad investments, and capital erosion, the panelists discuss issues of interest to the investment actuary, including Financial accounting Standards Board [FASB] activity in market-value [MV] accounting, ways to evaluate asset quality and default risk in an MV environment, the impact of MV accounting on investment strategy, the new benchmark of ‘Return on MV Surplus,’ MV behavior of assets and liabilities, use of derivative instruments to hedge MV surplus volatility, and investment aspects of risk-based capital. Discussion from participants is included. From the Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 17, No. 4B.

Description: In this paper, we consider the relationship between salary growth, stock and long bond returns. We use this to suggest that equities may have a role in hedging final salary-related benefits. Simulations from the empirical distribution for salaries, equities and interest rates are used to demonstrate the quantile hedge.

Description: This paper demonstrates that using a conditional probability approach to analyzing investment data yields investment forecast and stock option pricing models which more closely match actual market data, and it demonstrates the impact that conditional probabilities could have on CAPM beta and risk premia calculations. Reprinted from: Journal of Financial and Economic Practice, Vol. 6 No. 2 Spring 2006.