Description: This session at the SOA 2003 Washington, DC Spring Meeting examines the nuts and bolts of implementing a capital markets hedge program for offsetting the market risk embedded in variable annuity and equity-indexed annuity products..

Description: The goal of this paper is to dispel the prevailing belief that American-style options cannot be valued efficiently in a simulation model by presenting a general algorithm for such valuation, and thus remove what has been considered a major impediment to the use of simulation models for valuing financial instruments. Discussions of this paper are included.

Description: This session from the 1995 SOA Boston Meeting examines the use of derivatives to help optimize the inurance company portfolios and using pension theory in developing optimized portfolios in an insurance company environment. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 21, No.4b.

Description: This paper presents an algorithm for valuing American options in a path simulation model. It demonstrates the accuracy by an example involving a put option on a non-dividend-paying stock for which the exact premium could be determined. It shows how the use of simulation models can be useful in valuing a broker-dealer's derivative book and analyzing the asset-liability condition of financial intermediaries.

Description: This paper examines the pricing of catastrophe risk bonds. Catastrophe risk cannot be hedged by traditional securities. Therefore the pricing of catastrophe risk bonds requires an incomplete markets setting and this creates special difficulties in the pricing methodology. The paper briefly discusses the theory of equilibrium pricing and its relationship to the standard arbitrage-free valuation framework. Equilibrium pricing theory is used to develop a pricing method based on a model of the term structure of interest rates and a probability structure for the catastrophe risk. This pricing methodology can be used to assess the default spread on catastrophe risk bonds relative to traditional defaultable securities.

Description: 1994 SOA Spring Meeting, Orlando. In this session the speaker provided an overview of derivatives including: 1. Definition. 2. Uses. 3. Types of risks - market, credit, legal, and systems. 4. Risk management. 5. US regulatory guidelines and developments.

Description: Competition for space in distribution channels has resulted in a proliferation of exotic options embedded in variable annuity products. This article discusses how this has created a need which can be addressed, in part, by hedging variable annuity guarantees with long-dated equity derivatives.

Description: In this session from the 2005 SOA New Orleans Meeting, panelists discuss the ever-growing range of credit-derivative instruments that are becoming available including credit default swaps - CDSs, replicated synthetic asset transaction - RSAT and synthetic collateral debt obligations - CDOs. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 31, No. 1.

Description: In December 2007, Goldman Sachs launched a product called QxX index swap, which is designed to allow market participants to hedge or gain exposure to longevity and mortality risks. This presentation offers a quantitative analysis of this brand new financial innovation. First of all, the presentation sets up a risk-neutral framework to price QxX index swaps. This framework, which is based on the dynamics of death rates under a two-factor stochastic mortality model in a risk-adjusted probability measure, yields prices [spreads] that are fairly close to the spreads that Goldman Sachs currently offers. The presentation then explores the uncertainty involved in this model-based pricing framework. Specifically, it studies parameter risk by using Markov Chain Monte Carlo [MCMC] and model risk by examining structural changes in mortality dynamics. The results indicate that both model risk and parameter risk are significant. Actuaries should therefore be aware of these issues when placing a value on a longevity index swap.

Description: One of the most important problems in Finance is the valuation of financial securities written on underlying assets whose prices are subject to uncertainty. This paper presents a technique to estimate the unknown stochastic volatilities by solving the inverse problem associated with the parabolic partial differential equation governing risk neutral derivative security prices. This technique can be applied in a very general multi-factor setting and numerical examples are provided.