Description: 2013 Symposium Presenter's Diary: Responses to the Global Financial Crises

Description: Provides a lively overview and summary of key topics and speakers at 2013 Life & Annuity Symposium, held in Toronto in May. Provides a good feel for social events at the conference, including game transcriptions and pictures from Thomas C. Barham III Speed Chess Tournament.

Description: Describes the construction of the CBOE's VIX index. Shows mathematically how the variance of investment returns is reflected in the price of the index. Provides a rational explanation of technical factors that lead the index to perform inconsistently with market sentiment. Highly relevant for any hedger seeking to use the VIX index.

Description: Explains different disclosure requirements that apply to costs characterized as part of the "spread" and those that are part of the contract "fees". An example illustrates these concepts

Description: Describes a case study of estimating insurance liability dollar value of 1 bp using a polynomial approximation. The polynomial approximation is calibrated using a least-squares fit to results under a multi-scenario projection

Description: Provides an original formulation for the marginal contribution to risk for each payment in a dollar cost averaging strategy. Useful and simple insight.

Description: Describes how the mantra of 'tax cuts will pay for themselves" along with the political unwillingness to cut spending (extant since the 1980s), has led to this increasing debt problem in the U.S., reaching $17 trillion at time of writing. Other countries are behaving in a similar fashion, and it can be only a matter of time before the globe may reach another crisis, this time based on excessive government debt coupled with fewer interested investors.

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: Your correspondents couldn’t have asked for better weather in Orlando during the 2014 SOA Annual Meeting held at the Rosen Shingle Creek facility from Oct. 27-29. Just imagine them—notepads in hand,with their faithful portable typewriters and SLR cameras slung over their shoulders, tip-toeing around the alligators basking in the warm Florida sunshine in their quest to bring you the latest news. Shades of Hemingway! Well, maybe it wasn’t quite like that—given the ubiquity of modern wireless devices and the advent of the responsible drinking ethic. But hopefully you will find their brief reports about various Investment Section sponsored sessions and events diverting nonetheless.

Description: This article explores whether geopolitical risk still matters in an investment portfolio and how this scenario can change as time progresses. It discusses the impact of global central bank monetary policy on investment performance and risk.