Description: This article is a call for work that has been done in stochastic modeling and papers in the area of of stochastic modeling of investment returns in respect of the maturity and mortality guarantees offered on segregated fund and variable annuity products. These will be used in the symposium on stochastic modeling in September 1999 sponsored by the CIA, SOA and Actuarial Foundation.

Description: The article discusses that drawbacks of the HJM Heath-Jarrow-Morton class of stochastic interest models and suggests the use of the Longstaff-Schwartz string model. It describes the use and benefits of the Lonstaff-Schwartz string model.

Description: This article is about real estate as an alternative source of return and income. From Risks and Rewards Newsletter, August 2006, Issue No. 48.

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

Description: Provides an original formulation for the marginal contribution to risk for each payment in a dollar cost averaging strategy. Useful and simple insight.

Description: This article notes that life insurance companies have long used sophisticated techniques for appraising capital investment, and explores the question of whether these techniques can be applied to other industries.

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: Discussion of significant anomalies in option pricing due to the independent identically distributed assumption of the Black Scholes formula.

Description: Feature article discussing how insurers have reflected volatility in asset return assumptions when determining capital requirements, but have largely disregarded the impact of mortality volatility on their liability assumptions when performing stochastic analysis.

Description: “Many commentators have suggested that firms need to do stress tests to examine their vulnerability to adverse situations that are not within the data set used to parameterize their risk models. We suggest the adop¬tion of a terminology to describe stress tests and also a meth¬odology that can be adopted by any risk model user to test and communicate a test of the stability of model results.”