Description: Investment Fallacies: The Fable of the Storyteller and the Market

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: Investment Fallacies: Extended periods of robust macroeconomic growth are healthy for investing.

Description: This paper illustrates the application of stochastic control methods in managing the risk associated with an insurance business. We present the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman HJB equation and demonstrate its use in finding the optimal investment strategy based on some given criteria. Here we consider an insurance business with a fixed amount available for investment in a portfolio consisting of one non-risky asset and one risky asset. The object of the resulting control problem is to determine the investment strategy that minimizes infinite time ruin probability. The existence of a solution to the resulting HJB equation is shown. The relevant verification lemma is not presented in this paper and a numerical algorithm is given instead. Examples applied to exponential claims are also presented.

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”.

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.