Description: 20 years ago the author suggested that insurers invest a substantial part of their reserves in equities as an inflation hedge. Article discusses how equities have performed relative to inflation, in retrospect, and contemplates the future.

Description: Presented at October 1996 Annual Meeting. This session explores both conceptual and practical considerations involved with the formulation and implementation of investment strategy: decision-making framework and processes, measurement of risk and reward, constraints, modeling.

Description: 1996 Valuation Actuary Symposium. This session about asset modeling discussed securities with options and derivatives, corporate government debt, mortgage-backed securities, collateralized mortgage obligations, real estate equities, and investment and disinvestment strategies.

Description: This article is about equity real estate and how its becoming an important part of investment profiles.

Description: The investment risk taken by a pension fund comprises strategic risk and active risk. This paper discusses the relative merits of these two types of risk to the pension fund, possible rationales for the levels of strategic and active risk typically adopted mechanisms for capturing manager skill without taking on equity risk, and issues in setting liability-based benchmarks for investment managers

Description: The article introduces a cashflow matching strategic asset allocation (SAA) framework for life insurers. Given the recent shift to higher interest rates after two decades of persistent low interest rates, insurers have an opportunity to enhance their asset liability management by rebalancing asset portfolios to narrow duration gaps and attain higher risk-adjusted yields. The framework aims to align investment objectives with economic, regulatory, and rating agency requirements. It prioritizes cashflow matching as the primary optimization goal and incorporates security-level asset information to assist portfolio managers in executing SAA seamlessly. The article highlights the benefits of the cashflow matching SAA framework, including greater attention to cashflow matching, unbiased results, readily executable strategies, and stable economic reserves. A case study is included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in improving risk-adjusted return and cashflow matching for a representative liability block.

Description: This paper investigates a technique for developing investment assumptions for pricing that are consistent with the investment practices of the company for use in the pricing of single premium immediate annuities. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1979, Vol. 31.

Description: This paper argues that the self-financing axiom with mild assumptions on the conditional expected returns yields a market with an eventual arbitrage. This is accomplished by minimizing the conditional variance of a trade when the conditional expectation is a fixed constant. Examples with common processes shows that most models yield an eventual arbitrage. As a final application, a cost model is applied to prices of stripped coupon and principal payments on U.S. government bonds, where rates of return are estimated and lower bounds on market costs given.

Description: This paper presents enhancements to the classical cash-flow matching approach to developing fixed income portfolio investment strategy by allowing cash carry-forward and borrowing from future surpluses.

Description: This paper investigates how the concepts of asset-liability matching can be used to shape investment strategy. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1980, Vol. 32.