Description: The impact of Fed’s QE program on the financial markets has been enormous and profound. The tapering and the eventual removal of the stimulus will be equally enormous and profound, and may be disruptive. To adapt to the potential regime change in near future, some investment strategies have been proposed: (1) shorten duration to focus on the short end of the yield curve and create laddered portfolios; (2) reduce allocation to high yield bonds; (3) rotate out interest rate sensitive sectors such as utilities; and (4) use interest rate derivatives to hedge the interest rate uncertainties lying ahead. On the other hand, contrarians who see the QE program continuing may stay the course and consider (1) adding duration, (2) gaining exposure to high yield bonds, and (3) increasing allocation to utilities and telecoms.

Description: E-book contains 16 topical essays that express the opinions and thoughts of a number of authors on the subject of Investment Fallacies.

Description: In a paper entitled ‘Using Cash Flows to Allocate Investment Income’ [ARCH 1979.1] reference was made to the conversion of investment rates [and capital gain and loss rates] from rates based upon periods of original contribution to rates based upon dollars of original contribution. Thus arose the topic of this note.

Description: Given a financial transaction we are often interested in the number of internal rates of return [yield rates] and their location. From an actuarial point of view, the fundamental question is to identify those transactions with a single yield rate, or a single rate in some interval such as the positive reals. In this paper we are concerned with this counting problem. We survey various results concerning this problem, and provide a unifying approach together with some new insights.

Description: This paper argues that the self-financing axiom with mild assumptions on the conditional expected returns yields a market with an eventual arbitrage. This is accomplished by minimizing the conditional variance of a trade when the conditional expectation is a fixed constant. Examples with common processes shows that most models yield an eventual arbitrage. As a final application, a cost model is applied to prices of stripped coupon and principal payments on U.S. government bonds, where rates of return are estimated and lower bounds on market costs given.

Description: This session from the 1983 SOA Spring Meeting discusses disintermediation and intermediation risk - C-3 Risk, investment strategy and product design including market value adjusted products. From Record of Society of Actuaries Vol. 9, No. 2.

Description: This paper presents enhancements to the classical cash-flow matching approach to developing fixed income portfolio investment strategy by allowing cash carry-forward and borrowing from future surpluses.

Description: This paper investigates how the concepts of asset-liability matching can be used to shape investment strategy. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1980, Vol. 32.

Description: An overview of the articles in the August 2012 issue of Risk Management and a list of winners of the most recent call for papers, “Risk Metrics for Decision Making and ORSA.”

Description: Constant Proportion Portfolio Insurance (CPPI) performance is assessed on realistic assumptions and dynamic strategies to mitigate the so-called ”gap risk”.