Description: Target volatility, as an investment strategy, has been used by many funds not only as a way to smooth return but also as a way to manage risks of the VA guarantees. Contrary to existing research which favors volatility targeting over fixed allocation, this article shows that because of the existence of market jump risk, target volatility strategy does not necessarily offer an improved risk profile for VA writers. Further, target volatility coupled with leveraging can significantly increase tail risk for insurance companies.

Description: At this presentation from Session 79PD of the SOA 1999 San Francisco Annual Meeting, the speakers explain the financial risks inherent in the Asian financial crisis and other, more recent crises. They discuss how such risks can affect other countries and regions. They touch on such topics as sovereign risk and currency mismatching. The speakers also comment on impacts on multinational financial services operations and suggest ways for the industry to prevent or better manage these risks. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 25, No. 3.

Description: These are the charts from Session 79PD of the SOA 1999 San Francisco Annual Meeting where the speakers explain the financial risks inherent in the Asian financial crisis and other, more recent crises. They discuss how such risks can affect other countries and regions. They touch on such topics as sovereign risk and currency mismatching. The speakers also comment on impacts on multinational financial services operations and suggest ways for the industry to prevent or better manage these risks. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 25, No. 3.

Description: This article pertains to the optimal asset allocation of surplus from an insurance company model. The insurance company is represented by a compound Poisson risk process which is perturbed by diffusion and has investments. The investments are in both risky and risk-free types of assets similar to stocks/real estate and bonds. The insurance company can borrow at a constant interest rate in the event of a negative surplus. Numerical analysis appears to show that an optimal asset allocation range can be estimated for certain parameters and compared with insurance data. Using a conservative method to minimize the probability of ruin, a reasonable optimal asset allocation range for a typical insurance company is about 4.5 to 8.2 percent invested in risky stock/real estate assets. An inequality and the exact solution are obtained for the pure diffusion equation. In addition, the asymptotic form of the ruin probability is shown to be a power function.

Description: Discussion of Capital Market Modeling techniques