Description: August 2008 full issue of the Investment Section newsletter, Risks & Rewards.

Description: In this article chairperson Anthony Dardis takes a look back at the achievements of the Investment Section Council halfway through his tenure as chair.

Description: In reference to the book Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Steven Scoles describes our ability to detect patterns in certain aspects of life and how these patterns may in fact be simple randomness.

Description: As we meet with pension plan sponsors and consultants across Canada we find that the subject of liability-driven investing LDI comes up repeatedly even when we do not initiate the discussion. We also find that LDI seems to mean something different to each person we meet. Is LDI just a new name for asset/liability management ALM? Or is LDI just about hedging interest rate risks with fancy securities? In this article we describe a framework for understanding what LDI is, how it relates to ALM, and how it can be used to solve real-life problems for Canadian pension funds.

Description: General comments to section members from incoming chairperson.

Description: This article discusses capital market cycles, specifically considering whether or not 2008 was a good time to buy. It concludes that “stocks have likely only recently entered the buying opportunity range on an aggregate basis. However, from a psychological and risk management perspective, we should strongly consider that stock prices will revert beyond the mean for many years, perhaps even decades, before they get better.”

Description: Feature article discussing the too big to fail principle and whether or not strong competition is ideal in terms of the banking industry.

Description: Feature article discussing the implications and uses of market consistent embedded value in developing investment strategy.

Description: Feature article describing how traditional pension asset allocations contain so much risk that the details of the “liability benchmark” have been largely ignored.

Description: Discussion of significant anomalies in option pricing due to the independent identically distributed assumption of the Black Scholes formula.