Description: Are Your Scenarios on Target?From Risks and Rewards Newsletter, August 2005, Issue No. 47. Actuaries are faced with the dilemma of how to incorporate advances in insurance products and modeling technology into their work. Increasingly, this means looking at a large number of potential outcomes using stochastic simulations.

Description: This paper shows how the results of copula based capital aggregation models can always be locally approximated by relatively simple formulas. The paper defines the concepts of diversification factor and tail correlation matrix and describes methods for estimating these quantities from simulated data. We show how these ideas can be put into practice as both computational shortcuts and presentation tools.