Description: What is the impact of aging populations on economic growth and interest rates?” “Are low interest rates and inflation a short-term phenomenon?” “How will returns from different asset classes be impacted by future demographic trends?” “What are the differences between different countries and regions around the world?”

Description: The Investment Symposium is a day-and-a-half long seminar that will focus on the issues and questions faced by investors and risk managers, especially related to insurance companies and retirement plans. Presenters will discuss the big picture issues and explore practical solutions to today’s challenges. Experts will share new approaches to portfolio management and cutting edge research in asset-liability management. Technology, regulation and the economic environment will

Description: Insurance companies utilize derivatives in a variety of ways to manage and mitigate risks that are inherent in their investment or liability portfolios. They can be characterized by three main features: medium long-term duration; large volumes; and significant market risk exposure. Given the persistent low interest rate environment across the curve since the 2008 financial crisis, large companies need to hedge their liabilities, as illustrated by the significant recent increase from $786 billion as of fiscal year 2010 to $1,885 billion as of FY 2014 by insurance companies.As the Variable Annuities (VA) guarantees embedded within those liabilities hold a strong convex risk profile with respect to the underlying stock, VA carriers need to buy some convex hedge assets such as options to match the liability risk profile to improve hedge effectiveness, implying the growing cost of hedging. Such market impact of the quantity on the cost of hedging is further magnified in the recent period with the short-lived, but sharp transitions from low volatility to high volatility, when market volatility suddenly increases, even when there were no well-known fundamental catalysts. This partially stems from the growing managed volatility funds embedded within VA ($bn 400).VA carriers willing to trade a large quantity of options will see such market impact as an important dilemma, as the cost of placing one large order to close position will be far greater than the sum of infinitely small orders differed in time. In that context, managing market impact requires introducing an explicit market impact function, the influence of which the agent will try to minimize. The effect on hedge asset prices significantly depends on whether there is or not significant delta hedging activity. In case of no significant delta hedging activity, the risk appetite has a significant influence on the optimal execution strategy. If there is significant delta hedging activity, the optimal trading involve

Description: Discusses the types of risks that are considered derivatives, the pricing of a derivative, how to manage derivative risks once they are on your books, and some specific examples of how companies are managing them. From the 2002 Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 28, No. 3. Session 93PD of the Boston Annual Meeting.

Description: Presented at June 1996 Spring Meeting. Provides overview of modern pricing of assets such as derivatives. It includes theory and practical applications, particularly how they relate to insurance companies.

Description: We consider Libor market model and calibration process. We estimate some interest rate derivatives such as Caps and Swaptions. We use Monte Carlo methods with appropriate dynamics under spot measure and forward measure. Imposing martingale discretization property, the same quantities are estimated again to see a contrast or discrepancy in light of confidence interval. Based on algorithms discussed in the paper, “Arbitrage-free discretizations of lognormal forward Libor and swap rate models” by Glasserman, P and Zhao, X 2000, the algorithms are implemented in excel VBA. Starting with current market data such as FRAs and Bond Prices, we describe steps involved to estimate the price of interest rate derivatives such as Caps and Swaptions, which would be beneficial to the practitioners in the industry.

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: Presented at May 1996 Spring Meeting. The investment environment has undergone significant change over the last several years through the introduction of many sophisticated investment vehicles. This session provides an update on current challenges encountered by life insurance companies in accounting for this new array of investments. Among the issues covered will be accounting for derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, and other hedging vehicles. The session also includes some of the system and projection modeling challenges encountered as a by-product of investment in these vehicles.

Description: This presentation discusses a technique to reduce the bias from using Monte Carlo simulation to value American options.

Description: This session will demonstrate the advantages of approaches to duration matching and cash flow matching. Plan examples and sponsor’s objectives will be presented. An overview of when to choose one approach versus a blend of the two approaches will also be covered.