Archive for October, 2011

Most insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bond investors are holding onto their portfolio positions as they wait to see what the fourth quarter will bring in the way of new opportunities to deploy capital, say investment manager Clariden Leu in their latest monthly fund managers report.

Unsurprisingly, the Mariah Re tornado catastrophe bonds dominated much of the news last week as the impact of growing covered losses became clearer and investors sought to offload positions in the bonds. The fourth quarter now has its second cat bond marketing and investors will be hoping for a steady stream of new issuances up […]

CATCo Investment Management have released an announcement which discusses the potential exposure that some shareholders in their CATCo Reinsurance Opportunities Fund Ltd. may have due to increasing loss estimates from the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. They say that the portfolio has potential exposure to the NZ quakes in their Rest of World risk pillar […]

Mercer have assisted in the completion of the latest pension scheme buyout transaction which saw the benefits of 3,500 pension plan members have their assets of around £100m transferred to Standard Life. The majority of the pension scheme belonging to British publisher and media company EMAP was transferred to Standard Life while the remainder were […]

Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s have removed the ratings of two tranches of life insurance-linked notes issued by Avondale Securities SA. from CreditWatch as a correction to an administrative error. The notes issued by Avondale Securities were designed to transfer a block of life insurance risk to the capital markets through securitisation to allow the […]

Ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has announced that the Mariah Re Ltd. Series 2010-1 catastrophe bond is suspected to have been triggered after its sponsor American Family Mutual Insurance Company submitted an event notice indicating that they believe the deal to have defaulted as losses have breached the attachment point.

Regular catastrophe bond sponsor Munich Re are once again seeking to issue another transaction in their Queen Street series of deals. Queen Street IV Capital Ltd. is  being marketed to investors as a single tranche catastrophe bond seeking to issue notes which would provide Munich Re with $75m of cover over nearly 3.5 years (more […]

A quarterly market report published recently by broker dealer Lane Financial LLC clearly shows the recovery that catastrophe bond and insurance-linked security returns and valuations have been making since the massive drop experienced after the Tohoku, Japan earthquake and tsunami earlier this year.

As we wrote yesterday, the Mariah Re catastrophe bonds were the main losers in the secondary market during the month of September as mark to market losses increased due to the realisation that there would be a loss of investor principal for the Series 2010-2 notes and covered losses were still rising for the Series […]

Investor interest in catastrophe bonds, other types of insurance-linked securities and risk or reinsurance linked investment opportunities just keeps growing this year. The news from the broader financial markets continues to look depressing and investors are increasingly seeking out safe-havens to deposit their capital in. Investment opportunities which have a low correlation to the broader […]