Description: Describes session at the 2015 Life and Annuity Symposium on a new electronic exchange for equity securities, IEX. The exchange rules limit the potential for high frequency traders to front-run customer orders.

Description: Explains the more granular breakout of bond RBC factors proposed to the NAIC. Evaluates alternative asset allocation choices for insurers under the new rules.

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

Description: This article discusses Variable Annuity products with significant guaranteed minimum benefits, and hedging strategies used by insurers due to the mark to market accounting requirements for these liabilities under GAAP. It focuses in particular on delta-hedging and the implications of the 2008 market volatility.

Description: “The Great Tech Bubble is one of the great bubbles and collapses in financial market history. It’s an excellent reminder of the madness that humans in financial markets are capable of. That’s just in case we need another reminder right now.”

Description: Describes outlook for inflation, generally higher in the US and lower in Japan/Europe. Enumerates macroeconomic drivers of inflation, and comments on the pace of inflation-linked debt issuance globally.

Description: Surveys the outlook for interest rates among Inv Symposium participants, as of Feb 29 2016.

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.

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: “Global tactical asset allocation GTAA is an invest¬ment approach that seeks to exploit short-term mar¬ket inefficiencies to generate uncorrelated absolute returns by taking positions in various asset classes, regions, styles and currencies. Due to its low correlation with tradi¬tional asset classes, GTAA can diversify an existing portfolio without making material changes to the portfolio’s overall risk characteristics.”