Description: Actuarial Assumptions for Pension Plans Invite Arbitrage The Case of Pension Obligation Bonds by Jeremy Gold from Risks and Rewards Newsletter, September 2000, Issue No. 35.

Description: The Case Against Stock in Corporate Pension Funds

Description: A paper on investment results of life insurance companies investing in high-yield, lower quality bonds, September, 1999.

Description: Investment Fallacies: Bitcoin Fallacies

Description: [Title should have been 'Communication by Actuaries WITH Investment Professionals ....'] Actuaries working with investments must communicate not only with investment professionals, but also with senior managers and board members with non-financial backgrounds. Panelists show and critique examples of communicating such information using statistics and graphs. From the 2002 Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 28, No. 3. Session 136PD of the Boston Annual Meeting.

Description: 1994 SOA Spring Meeting, San Francisco. In this interactive presentation, the panel fielded investment questions from the audience. Prepared and audience questions included: 1. What is the FLUX measure? What's it supposed to do for regulators and insurance companies? 2. What sort of things really went on that caused the difficulties at Executive Life, First Capital, and Mutual Benefit? 3. What are some examples of hedges that you would recommend for a $100 million SPDA portfolio to try and combat the effects of rising interest rates? 4. Given the changes that experienced in interest rates, what's that been doing to the durations of typical interest-sensitive liabilities? 5. What do you do to hedge with derivatives or whatever if interest rates are going down? 6. What level of asset-liability matching do companies usually target? How do regulators view this?

Description: Panelists discuss issues faced by the insurance-company portfolio manager, how to measure or value interest-rate risk, some of the new cash investment vehicles available, the futures and options market, construction of a synthetic security, and the review of mortgage-backed securities under new analytical techniques. From the 1987 Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 13, No. 3.

Description: 1993 SOA Meeting, Quebec. This session discussion is about accounting, collateralized mortgage obligation structures, hybrid bonds, federal income taxes, fair-value disclosures and derivatives.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to present to the actuarial profession a stochastic investment model which can be used for simulations extending for many years ahead. Discussed in the paper are the general reasons for choosing the style of model, the general model and how to use it, the assumptions and the sensitivity of model to the assumptions made and the possible applications in the investment and actuarial fields.

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