Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits, indexed variable annuities, etc. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approach to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications with regard to the difficulty of risk management.

Description: This article discusses facts and issues related to the selection of a stock’s price distribution.

Description: This paper is from the Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1956 Volume 8, Number 20. It was presented at the 1956 Spring Meetings of the Society of Actuaries for discussion. The author presents an outline of how difficulties in the determination of a frequency distribution of the expected costs may be overcome by, in part, applying the concept of using a series of random numbers with a view of making mortality studies for each life in a group of annuitants. The paper also presents the results of some experiments which were designed to discover whether or not the concept could be conducted on an IBM 650 electronic data processing machine.

Description: David shares his thoughts on using Microsoft's High Performance Computing Server, or HPCS, to cluster computer resources, improve timely performance, and reduce actuarial modeling costs.

Description: Python has become the fastest-growing major programming language in the world. It has surged in popularity over the last decade, following the development of its industry-leading capabilities in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and it is now one of the most globally popular and widely used languages. In this article, I discuss some of the reasons for its popularity and explain why many actuaries and insurers have started using Python.

Description: This article looks at an extensive integrated collection of financial mathematical modeling packages available in R, a language and environment for statistical computing.

Description: This article introduces the reader to probabilistic methods used to model interactions in the financial market place. Three topics are specifically discussed, two concern modeling methods and the other concerns data analysis methods.

Description: Discussion of a newly released LTC experience study, including description of data and its increased scope compared to the prior report, reporting specifications, and findings.

Description: In this article the author presents a general solution to the problem of finding the effective annual interest rate commonly arising in finance for an installment loan.