Best of Artemis, week ending 2nd March 2014

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 2nd March 2014, on catastrophe bonds, reinsurance capital and related risk transfer topics, from the last seven days on Artemis. To ensure you never miss a thing  subscribe to the weekly Artemis email newsletter updates.

Top ten most viewed articles on Artemis.bm, week ending 2nd March 2014:

1. New reinsurance capital ‘actually quite intelligent’: Aspen CEO
   New capital that flowed into the reinsurance market from alternative sources, like pension funds and other capital markets investors, is more intelligent than capital seen in previous softening markets, according to one insurance and reinsurance group CEO.
2. The catastrophe bond yield advantage
   The return advantage provided by an investment in catastrophe bonds, over an investment in other forms of yielding debt instrument, has narrowed over the last two years, largely due to pricing pressure lowering yields on cat bonds more quickly.
3. The insurance-linked securities (versus traditional reinsurance) job gap
   The Bermuda Finance Minister Bob Richards has highlighted the issue that insurance linked securities funds and institutional investor backed reinsurance capital managers do not create the same number of jobs as traditional reinsurance companies.
4. CATCo hires ex-AQR underwriters Vaughan and Montgomerie
   Specialist reinsurance and retrocessional insurance-linked securities manager CATCo Investment Management is strengthening its underwriting team with the hire of two experienced underwriters both with previous experience from AQR.
5. Hiscox deploys $110m through collateralised reinsurance ILS funds
   Bermuda headquartered insurance and reinsurance group Hiscox deployed $110m of its own and third-party sourced capital through collateralised reinsurance and insurance-linked securities (ILS) funds at the beginning of the year, less than it expected.
6. Guy Carpenter launches satellite service for evaluating catastrophe losses
   Reinsurance broker Guy Carpenter has launched a new satellite-based service, GC CAT-VIEWSM, which aims to provide initial loss estimates of catastrophe events using satellite imagery and other data sources.
7. How Berkshire Hathaway thinks of reinsurance float: Warren Buffett
   Saturday saw the publication of one of the most interesting shareholder letters of the year, high-profile investor Warren Buffett’s letter to shareholders in his diversified investments, insurance and reinsurance firm Berkshire Hathaway.
8. Traditional reinsurers challenged to compete on cost-of-capital
   Traditional reinsurance companies are being challenged to compete with insurance-linked securities (ILS), catastrophe bonds and collateralized reinsurance products which have a lower cost-of-capital than them, according to GC Securities.
9. Insured losses from U.S. ‘Polar Vortex’ exceed $1.5 billion
   Estimates of insurance industry losses caused by the U.S. winter storm known as the ‘Polar Vortex’, which impacted much of the country from January 5th to the 8th 2014, already exceed $1.5 billion according to Property Claim Services (PCS).
10. Alleghany builds capabilities in alternative reinsurance capital & ILS
    Alleghany Corporation, the insurance and reinsurance holding company, is building out its capabilities in alternative reinsurance capital and insurance-linked securities with the help of its subsidiary TransRe and its investment in an alternative asset manager.

This is by no means every article published on Artemis during the last week, just the most popular, some of which were published over a week ago. There were 18 new articles published in the last week. To ensure you always stay up to date with Artemis and never miss a story subscribe to our weekly email newsletter which is delivered every Wednesday.

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