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: Feature article describing the connection between negative demographics and economic growth.

Description: “What is the likelihood of market crashes? This article seeks to provide an answer to this and related questions by focusing mainly on the crash of October 1987. Specifically, we shall seek answers to three questions: 1. Given the history of market returns, was the crash of ‘87 unusual? 2. How do conditional variance models such as GARCH behave around periods of extreme moves in the market? 3. What is the impact of the crash on backtesting and performance evaluation?” Editor’s Note: The following article originally appeared in the Winter 1998 issue of The BARRA Newsletter, Horizon, and is reprinted here with permission.

Description: This article provides an analysis of Value at Risk VAR and its advantages and limitations as a tool for assessing and quantifying market risk. The article originally appeared in the August 1997 issue of Financial Engineering News and is reprinted with permission.

Description: The author describes a theory of long-term interest-rate trends, originally propounded in 1899 by actuary Charlton T. Lewis, and how well the theory stands up in light of 20th century experience.

Description: This paper concludes that there are two index rates that could best replace the 30-year Treasury in the calculation of the Current Liability of a pension plan - either the 30 year swap rate or the benchmark 30-year FNMA bond.

Description: The investment risk taken by a pension fund comprises strategic risk and active risk. This paper discusses the relative merits of these two types of risk to the pension fund, possible rationales for the levels of strategic and active risk typically adopted mechanisms for capturing manager skill without taking on equity risk, and issues in setting liability-based benchmarks for investment managers

Description: Read the June 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.