Description: Feature article discussing the current state of interest rates globally.

Description: 1996 Valuation Actuary Symposium. In this session on sources of earnings, the panelists discusses implementation of SOE reporting, use of SOE as a management tool, why having SOE reporting is particularly useful for international operations, and SOE reporting from a reinsurance perspective.

Description: Investment opportunities are driven by events in the economy and how participants in the financial markets react to those events. This keynote address will highlight current economic themes and their impact on investment opportunities.

Description: A central problem for regulators and risk managers concerns the risk assessment of an aggregate portfolio defined as the sum of d individual dependent risks Xi. This problem is mainly a numerical issue once the joint distribution of (X1,X2, . . . ,Xd) is fully specified. Unfortunately, while the marginal distributions of the risks Xi are often known, their interaction (dependence) is usually either unknown or only partially known, implying that any computed risk measure of the portfolio is subject to model uncertainty. Previous academic research has focused on the maximum and minimum possible values of a given risk measure of the portfolio, in the case in which only the marginal distributions are known. This approach leads to wide bounds, as all information on the dependence is ignored. In this paper, we integrate in a natural way available information on the multivariate dependence and provide easy-to-compute bounds for the risk measure at hand. We observe that incorporating the information of a well-fitted multivariate model may, or may not, lead to much tighter bounds, a feature that also depends on the risk measure used. We illustrate this point by showing that the Value-at-Risk at a very high confidence level (as used in Basel II) is typically prone to very high model risk, even if one knows the multivariate distribution almost completely. Our results make it possible to determine which risk measures can benefit from adding dependence information (i.e., leading to narrower bounds when used to assess portfolio risk), and, hence, to identify those models for which it would be meaningful to develop accurate multivariate models.

Description: Research material that developed a Liability-Driven Investment (LDI) benchmark framework.

Description: This research report introduces the concept of a preference function, which is a generalization of the utility function.

Description: This report introduces actuaries and risk managers in the insurance and pension industries to current literature discussing growth rates in the past and future expectations.

Description: This is a short story on the retirement income calculator.

Description: The author makes 10 predictions of how risk management will change over the next decade.

Description: In *From Distress to Distinction*, Chris Droussiotis explores a novel approach to valuing distressed companies using option pricing theory, drawing parallels to the financial challenges faced by startups. With over 30 years in banking and startup advising, he emphasizes that both distressed firms and early-stage ventures endure periods of negative cash flow but retain potential for recovery. He combines Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) and the Black-Scholes Option Pricing Model to evaluate distressed firms’ recovery prospects and debt sustainability. A case study on Spirit Airlines illustrates this approach: though its current equity value is negative, projected future cash flows suggest significant potential recovery. Droussiotis concludes that strategic valuation, using trend, peer, and expected analysis, can reveal hidden value in distressed companies, guiding effective investment and restructuring decisions.