Description: The US life insurance industry is just beginning to talk about risk management best practices. This article discusses the practices that have evolved in other industries by those before.

Description: This article is an overview of the presentations made at the Advanced Risk Management Seminar. Some topics were 1 the importance of enterprise risk management 2 how policyholder behavior affects the risks of GMBD riders and 3 credit risk.

Description: The purpose of the article is to highlight how a person or organization can excel in both a highly-competitive expert-driven environment and one where the environment is less so. One should focus on what can be done well and delegate the remaining tasks to those who are better at performing them. One should understand the environment they are operating in, how it impacts them, and how it may change through time. The principles have application to investment management, investment performance, organizational performance, business development, career progression and economics.

Description: This article explores the effectiveness of hedging delta and rho of equity options. This provides insight into the frequency and severity of losses due to not hedging volatility risk or other higher order risks. 10yr-equity put option strategies were chosen to represent the risk of hedging guaranteed benefits attached to variable annuities, while 1-yr put and call strategies were modeled to investigate the risk of hedging equity index interest credited to fixed indexed annuities. In both cases, the value of the option was compared to the value of delta/rho hedges in the tail of both actual historical and simulated scenarios for equity returns and volatilities. The historical path of interest rates and equities was generally used to highlight the hedge impact for different implied volatility assumptions in each example.

Description: While some people proclaim the imminent triumph of renewable energy, this article argues that fossil fuels will continue to be part of the energy mix.

Description: Article introducing a new department in the newsletter by the section's SOA staff partner.

Description: Feature article discussing Nassim Taleb’s black swan theory. Taleb points out that banks keep their loans at full value - anchored to the book value of the loan. The solution to the problem is to use mark-to-market reporting and have volatility instead of having no volatility and then experiencing a Black Swan event.

Description: This article re-caps the Investment Actuary Symposium held on November 8-9, 2001 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Description: The author provides an overview, from a banking perspective, of Value at Risk VAR and its use as a risk management tool. This article originally appeared in the August 1997 issue of Financial Engineering News and is reprinted with permission.

Description: Applies the economic concept of negative externality (where firms profit but create unacceptable social costs) to systemic of financial institutions. Identifies alternatives to the traditional (Pigou) response of taxing the firm.