Description: A primer on Credit Default Swaps

Description: In this article the author asserts that issuers of credit default swaps should hold reserves for the liabilities associated with the derivative contracts. This would significantly reduce most of the major problems associated with the trading of these instruments.

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: This session will demonstrate the advantages of approaches to duration matching and cash flow matching. Plan examples and sponsor’s objectives will be presented. An overview of when to choose one approach versus a blend of the two approaches will also be covered.

Description: Research projects in pension - Pension Risk Management: Derivatives, Fiduciary Duty and Process.

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: Article discusses possible effects of negative interest rates on product development, risk management, investment management and in-force management.

Description: This paper shows that the Esscher transform is also an efficient technique for valuing derivative securities if the logarithms of the prices of the primitive securities are governed by certain stochastic processes with stationary and independent increments. Two applications are presented, the first for valuing a European call option and the second for pricing derivative securities of multiple risky assets.

Description: Introduction to option pricing using Black-Scholes. Discussion on the limitations of Black-Scholes and of its alternatives such as Heston. Clear, accessible explanation of key results of mathematical finance including risk-neutral valuation.