Description: This 2001 article discusses the requirement to assess hedge effectiveness in the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s new statement on derivatives accounting, FAS 133, Accounting for Derivative Instruments and Hedging Activities, as critical for qualifying for “special” hedge accounting. The article provides analysis of different approaches and the potential difficulties encountered. This article is reprinted with permission from Derivatives Week.

Description: This article explores the effectiveness of hedging delta and rho of equity options. This provides insight into the frequency and severity of losses due to not hedging volatility risk or other higher order risks. 10yr-equity put option strategies were chosen to represent the risk of hedging guaranteed benefits attached to variable annuities, while 1-yr put and call strategies were modeled to investigate the risk of hedging equity index interest credited to fixed indexed annuities. In both cases, the value of the option was compared to the value of delta/rho hedges in the tail of both actual historical and simulated scenarios for equity returns and volatilities. The historical path of interest rates and equities was generally used to highlight the hedge impact for different implied volatility assumptions in each example.

Description: Proposes alternatives for estimating the long term interest returns in Indexed Universal Life products. Defends expected return of 20%-45% on hedge budgets.

Description: Insurance companies use derivatives to manage and mitigate risks that are inherent in their investment or liability portfolios, including traditional asset/liability matching, dynamic hedging and static hedging. The authors explore how Solvency II will influence life insurers’ hedging strategies.

Description: New Zealand is about to launch its first variable annuity with guaranteed lifetime withdrawal benefits. The product design is mindful of the lessons from the financial crisis in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Description: The bank’s customers viz. non-bank company often get into various kinds of derivative transactions with a bank or some other non-bank company in order to cover or hedge against the unwanted exposure to volatility in interest rates, currency rates or some other underlying rate. A non-bank company defaults when the situation goes unfavorable enough for it to have no other alternative this cascades the impact to many other non-bank companies and banks. I take forward the opinion that non-bank company defaults are more likely than those by a bank in a derivative contract. This risk in the risk management approach using derivatives can be reduced through the derivatives framework proposed in this paper. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

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