Description: This article reviews the various functions and current activities of the The Society's Committee on Mortality under Ordinary Insurances and Annuities and summarizes the latest mortality experience study.

Description: This excerpt is taken from Section V., Assumptions and Methods Underlying Actuarial Estimates, in the 2004 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance Trust Funds. From Pension Section News, September 2004, Issue No. 56.

Description: This paper establishes both first-order and second-order asymptotics for the Frechet, Weibull and Gumbel cases.

Description: This article examines trends of the stock market beginning with Dow theory - market prices tend to trend either upwards, a bull trend, or downwards, a bear trend. It discusses the many trading rules based on diverse patterns in the price series since the time of Dow including strictly filter rules.

Description: This article discusses why middle-market consumers don’t seek much-needed financial advice from professional financial advisors.

Description: This summary explains the techniques used and the results from the application of futurism techniques utilized to explore mortality improvement. From the 2008 SOA Spring Meeting, Quebec City.

Description: A critical step in valuing a company for the purpose of financial reporting is the computation of the market value of economic surplus (MVES). This article provides a novel approach to the valuation of MVES that is stable and reasonably immune to “market noise.” Current approaches to the calculation of economic surplus of an insurance company generally define such surplus as the market value of the assets (MVA) supporting the liabilities less the market value of liabilities (MVL). While MVA is observable in the market, MVL is typically computed directly, without regard to the underlying supporting assets. Subtracting MVL from any value of assets that changes with market movements results in an unstable surplus. Consequently, a surplus that is not fully reflective of market sentiment has been rejected by many. This same approach is further used in the calculation of market consistent embedded value (MCEV) when a balance sheet approach is used .

Description: Summarizes results of PBR survey of regulators by the Valuation Law and Manual Team, VLMT, of the Life Reserves Working Group, LRWG. Did not say what regulators were surveyed.

Description: This article explores implications for the future of improving the application of existing underwriting techniques and and taking maximum advantage of new technologies.

Description: This paper studies the theoretical and numerical convergence of Gram-Charlier series applied to the pricing of Asian options.