Archive for February, 2009

Earlier this month I wrote about Star Gas Partners and their 10Q report which left you with the impression that they had failed to protect themselves against the vagaries of the weather even though they run what seems a decent weather risk management program. The 10Q perhaps highlighted that just having weather risk insurance and […]

Advances in risk modelling, measurement and management are all pointing towards the emergence of a much more fluid market for catastrophe instruments in Europe particularly with regards to windstorms (such as the recent windstorm Klaus). Right now there have been a few catastrophe bonds which have European windstorm exposure but no market comparable to the […]

Standard & Poor’s has announced that both the Atlas Reinsurance III and Atlas Reinsurance IV catastrophe bonds have not had any change made to their ratings following a reset which occurred on the 9th February. Scor, the ceding reinsurer in both deals, elected to update the notional portfolios used to model the attachment and exhaustion […]

We’ve realised that a lot of the Artemis community only visit the blog to catch up on the latest happenings in the insurance risk transfer and weather trading markets. So some of you may not be aware that we have MarketViews on the main Artemis.bm website. The MarketViews give you a chance to be listed […]

A new joint venture company has been set up to provide aggregation and distribution services for European natural catastrophe loss data. It’s aiming to provide a similar service to the U.S. Property Claims Service. PERILS AG has been set up by a number of European companies who are all equal shareholders in the new venture. […]

The topics covered by us here at Artemis are mostly devoted to natural catastrophes and the methods utilised for hedging against them to protect the balance-sheet of re/insurers and cedents. Guy Carpenter have published a report looking at the volume of man-made losses and types of events which caused them during 2008. The annual average […]

I’ve written a number of times about the relative performance of cat bonds compared to other investments but it is only in the past couple of months that the difference in performance is really becoming apparent. Despite all the negative press about securitization, reports of large catastrophe losses, discussion of the failure of Lehman Brothers […]

Scor’s catastrophe bond Atlas Reinsurance V has been delayed slightly. Originally expected to close out on the 5th of February, it’s now expected that pricing will be firmed up this week and the bond will  next week. You can find more details on the Atlas Re V deal in our Deal Directory.

Another winter storm is beginning to impact Europe today. France’s west coast has been subjected to winds of 100kph and Paris is forecast to face winds of up to 120kph through the night (75mph). It’s not looking to be quite as severe as the storm of two weekends ago but the severity of the weather […]

The wildfires affecting Victoria, Australia are causing widespread destruction and loss of life. The fires, caused by a combination of above average temperatures and tinder dry bush and forest, have destroyed in excess of 750 homes and caused over 130 deaths so far. Google have created a map showing the extent of the fires. It […]