Description: The paper demonstrates that the most popular rationalization for evolving glide paths is flawed and should be discarded. The paper also demonstrates that glide paths should generally evolve for investors that endeavor to optimize outcomes and reevaluate their portfolios regularly.

Description: Institutional investors such as pension plans and insurance companies have enjoyed strong equity returns for a length of time with few historical precedents. Nearly a decade after the end of the financial crisis, strategies to provide downside protection remain expensive and the performance of traditional risk-managed funds has disappointed investors.

Description: Investment risk management has become a core competency of insurance companies, and much has been discussed on this topic. This session examines the current investment risk management practices such as product line specific hedging and macro hedging, with a focus on what still remains to be addressed—whether the tradeoff of addition risk management is worthwhile.

Description: Derives appropriate hedge ratios for CPPI strategies, taking into account discrete hedge times and market dislocations (gap risk).

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: A research report providing a primer on the mechanics and uses of the Hidden Markov Model for actuarial and financial applications.

Description: Recaps April 2015 seminar on derivatives use for fund managers and insurers in China. Describes growth in Chinese derivatives market including CSI 300 futures

Description: The goal of this paper is to examine similarities between value investing and enterprise risk management (ERM) methods.

Description: The goal of this paper is to examine similarities between value investing and enterprise risk management (ERM) methods.

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: Feature article describing how traditional pension asset allocations contain so much risk that the details of the “liability benchmark” have been largely ignored.

Description: The values of life insurance and annuity liabilities move in opposite directions in response to a change in the underlying mortality. Natural hedging utilizes this to stabilize aggregate liability cash flows. Our study shows empirical evidence that insurers who utilize natural hedging also charge lower premiums than otherwise similar insurers. This indicates that insurers who are able to utilize natural hedging have a competitive advantage. In addition, we show how a mortality swap might be used to provide the benefits of natural hedging to a firm that writes only one of the lines of business.

Description: This session from the 2003 SOA Orlando Meeting provides an overview of how insurers, pension plans and other institutional investors measure and report manager performance, the benchmarks used and capital at risk CAR. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 29, No. 3.

Description: This session covers the differences between quantitative models and traditional techniques for measuring credit exposure pricing models versus portfolio risk management models and an introduction to some commercially available models, such as J. P. Morgan’s Credit Metrics and Moody’s/KMV Portfolio Manager. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 29, No. 1, Washington, D.C. Spring Meeting, May 29–30, 2003, Session 19PD.

Description: This session 13TS of the Dallas Spring Meeting provides a basic background on derivatives and discusses how derivatives can be used in insurance and pension investment portfolios, how they are valued, and how they can impact the long-term financial situation of a portfolio.From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 27, No. 1, Session 13TS

Description: Dynamically Hedging Insurance Product Risk by Marshall C. Greenbaum from Risks and Rewards Newsletter, April 2000, Issue No. 34. A dynamic hedging program cab be an effective solution to insurance company market risk management problems.

Description: Traditional mean-variance method does not take skewness of the random rate of return into consideration. It only considers minimum variance for a given acceptable rate of return, which limited the probability of obtaining higher rate of return. If the skewness of return for the portfolio is incorporated into model of traditional approach, then the resulting non-linear programing model is not computational efficient, which certainly is complicated. On the other hand, possibilistic programming provides more efficient techniques to solve the imprecision nature of rate of return and also preserves the original linear model.

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA New York Meeting addresses asset prepayments including emerging prepayment experience in the mortgage-backed - CMO security arena, special modeling considerations when addressing prepayments and the NAIC's FLUX model and the scenario and assumption specifications of that model. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No. 2.

Description: This is a Fellowship Credit Research Paper. A portfolio of different insurance policies such as temporary, endowment and whole-life insurance policies is studied in a stochastic mortality and interest environment. The first two moments of the present value of the benefits of the portfolio are derived. The riskiness of the portfolio as measured by the variance of the present value of the benefits can be divided into an insurance risk and an investment risk in two different ways. One way leads to a more natural interpretation of the two risk components. A simple portfolio is used to illustrate the results.

Description: In this paper we discuss the link between the price of a contingent claim and its replicating strategies. We compute the replicating strategies for some contingent claims when the price of stocks are modeled using either the Wiener process or the Poisson process. These replicating strategies are essential knowledge if one wishes to implement a dynamic trading strategy.

Description: Panelists discuss issues faced by the insurance-company portfolio manager, how to measure or value interest-rate risk, some of the new cash investment vehicles available, the futures and options market, construction of a synthetic security, and the review of mortgage-backed securities under new analytical techniques. From the 1987 Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 13, No. 3.

Description: From the 1985 Valuation Actuary Symposium Discussion of the process for evaluating the financial soundness of an insurance organization from organizations outside of the Company

Description: This panel discussed studies of the risk of loss due to changes in the interest rate environment. It addressed why the C-3 risk is important and how inflation and stability in interest rates can affect the financial soundness of life insurance companies. There was also a discussion of the theoretical work being carried out to calibrate the C-3 risk of variation in interest rates and to what extent the valuation actuary can properly recognize the risk of loss from changes in the interest rate environment within the framework of valuations laws and regulations.