Description: This article is a synopsis of a 2017 Society of Actuaries annual meeting session of the same title.

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: Correspondent's report from the Investment Section Breakfast at the SOA Annual Meeting in Austin 2015

Description: Describes investment strategy targets used in the investment competition under way for investment section members in 2017.

Description: Highlights a new research paper on determining discount rates for pension plans, by John Turner. The paper breaks new ground on deciding on the appropriate discount rate for untradeable benefit obligations, with a comprehensive summary of the field.

Description: The article makes reference to how the intervention by government agencies and institutions into the financial marketplace are creating distortions. This artificial tampering into market mechanisms will likely result in major financial dislocations down the road as natural economic forces (coined by the term "invisible hand") eventually are allowed to come into play.

Description: The article reviews recent investment performance of stable value compared to other low risk alternatives, discusses current criticisms of the option, and concludes that they are not well founded. Criticism reflects a lack of openness to the full range of stable value contracts available and manager bias against traditional GICs, not a real lack of wrap capacity. Stable value continues to be the pareto superior low risk option.

Description: The article summarizes a session on asset validation; the featured speakers were an investment manager, a company investment actuary, and a consultant.

Description: By necessity, attributions of financial processes require approximations. Tools used for approximations include Aumann-Shapley, time step, step-through, average step-through, partial derivative, and average partial derivative. Significantly non-linear paths can cause problems during attribution. Time (theta) and market factors must be handled concurrently. Typically contractual factors can be handled separately. Average Step-Through, Aumann-Shapley and Aumann-Shapley-3 points perform the best given the same time period. Attribution should be done with fairly small time steps as opposed to using a lot of points in the Aumann-Shapley calculation, but using Aumann-Shapley-3 points as a last step has some advantages.

Description: The winners of the Investment Section's 2016 Asset Allocation Contest are announced, along with a recap of the contest and market performance.