Description: ICP 16 and its requirement for an Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) will offer opportunities for the actuarial profession to provide uniquely well-educated and professional assistance to this process.

Description: This article deals with enterprise risk management and how the techniques contained within the discipline can help prevent unforeseen large mistakes in strategy, product design, and product management

Description: This session will serve as a guide on how to implement a factor-based optimization in the Strategic Asset Allocation process. The session will review a factor-based investing approach and cover the top-down macroeconomic drivers of risk and return for various asset classes. We will then illustrate implementation of this investing approach and determination of an optimal Strategic Asset Allocation through a pension fund case study. There will be an interactive element to the session as the factor sensitivities of various portfolios can be examined in real-time.

Description: Applications of Lagrangian distributions to modelling claim frequency data in an insurance portfolio is a relatively new concept. The major difficulty is that the generating functions of these distributions cannot be expressed in terms of elementary functions. Also deriving moments and/or cumulants is somewhat tedious. This article illustrates how to use Maple effectively to overcome these difficulties.

Description: Recently, there has been growing interest among insurance and investment experts to focus on the use of a tail conditional expectation as a measure of risk, since it shares properties that are considered desirable and applicable in a variety of situations. This paper examines above risk measure in the case of a multivariate gamma portfolio. We demonstrate the explicit formulas for tail conditional expectation and based on it capital allocation when the proposed multivariate model consists of dependent and independent gamma marginals

Description: Contains two separate articles, called notes. The first note, “A note on correlation in mean variance portfolio theory,” is an elementary discussion of how negative correlation coefficients can be, given any set of N random variables. The second note, “Two essential formulas in actuarial science and financial mathematics,” gives a more or less self-contained introduction to Jensen’s inequality and to another formula, which the author decided to call the “survival function expectation formula.”

Description: Risk management and capital budgeting are two critical components of the corporate decision process. They often need to be considered jointly at the corporate level because of their natural interaction through the dependent risk exposures and other synergetic relationships within an intricate corporate structure in a dynamic business environment. . This paper develops an integrated framework that aligns these two important corporate strategies across business divisions to optimize the streamlined enterprise strategic goal in a multi-period setting. The proposed integrated framework can serve as a practical guideline for corporate executives to optimally coordinate capital budgeting and risk management at the enterprise level.

Description: The Investment Section is hosting a member’s only contest on asset allocation. The results will be reported each week.

Description: The article discusses the characteristics of the high-yielding bank loan asset class.

Description: For most of the last forty years, corporate defined benefit pension plan assets have been managed to balance risk versus reward in more or less the same way that a risk averse individual would do with his own portfolio. Recently liability cognizant strategies have been developed, but these also attempt to balance risks and rewards. But pension plans are not individuals; they, much like their widely-held corporate sponsors, are pass-through institutions. The economics of such entities are found in the corporate finance literature rather than in the literature of portfolio choice. The corporate finance (and thus the pension finance) objective is economic value added rather than return for risk. Enterprise risk management is a corporate finance activity too and its goal should also be value added rather than return for risk. The intersection of enterprise risk management and pension finance leads to a value-based discipline with two startling results: • Widely-held corporations can increase shareholder value by hedging away their own systematic risk (e.g., CAPM β). • Very many corporate defined benefit pension plans should define their liabilities and manage their assets to develop a net short equity exposure (negative β).