Description: Investment Fallacies: The "Dollar Bill" Fallacy

Description: Read the September 2020 issue of Risks & Rewards published by the Investment Section. Newsletters provide practical information for the working actuary, articles on trends that impact sections and news about section activities.

Description: ongoing discussion of the proper interest rate to use in discounting liability cash flows to reflect credit risk of the insurer in a fair value accounting system

Description: Discusses the recent developments with RBC requirements. At the forefront of the RBC changes is the stochastic exclusion test.

Description: Many experts tout the benefits of index investing, but history tells us that when enough investors do the same thing it tends to end badly. Stay tuned!

Description: In this paper we study the pricing of financial options and contingent claims. We show that two time-honored concepts in actuarial science - the Esscher transform and the adjustment coefficient - are efficient tools for pricing many options and derivative securities if the logarithms of the prices of the primitive securities are certain stochastic processes with stationary and independent increments. We also study the pricing of American options on two stocks without expiration date and with payoff functions which are homogeneous with respect to the two stock prices.

Description: In this paper,we present a method which first converges a two dimensional data to a univariate one and then uses the interval censoring technique to estimate the probability of failure of a Joint-life status from a heavily censored data. Our study shows that the life annuities of joint-life status calculated assuming independence overestimates the ones evaluated from an actual sample of population.

Description: By the use of resampling and extreme value statistics we will develop a method to reduce the time and costs of testing insurance company insolvency. Most ruin models require assumptions about the surplus distribution and/or assumptions about the claims count and severity distributions. The actuary may not be comfortable in making these ruin assumptions. Instead, he or she may generate such distributions by running extensive computer simulations of corporate models, I introduce a method to reduce the number of simulations necessary' to estimate the 1 and 0.1 percentiles of the surplus distribution. This approach 'cuts off' the tail at approximately the tenth percentile of the sample distribution and generates new tails for the distribution by resampling. Averages of the new order statistics approximate the I and 0.1 percentiles.

Description: The two-parameter Pareto distribution is a commonly used model in reliability and risk modeling. Minimum variance unbiased estimates of the parameters of Pareto distribution are not known. In this paper, we propose and investigate a method of estimation of the parameters of the Pareto distribution. This method is based on minimization of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance between the empirical cumulative distribution function [cdf] and the cdf of the Pareto distribution.

Description: In recent years, insurance companies have been introducing saving products whose returns are linked to equity market performance. Equity-indexed annuities [EIA's] are one of the products of this kind. This paper is a study on the recent introduction and popularity growth of equity-indexed annuities. An index is considered which provides a minimum interest guarantee and a participation in the increase in an index.