Archive for November, 2011

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has for a number of years been offering hurricane futures and options to anyone seeking to hedge the risks of landfalling hurricanes impacting their bottom line. Users of these contracts are generally re/insurers, some hedge funds, ILS funds and investors with exposure to specific storms and certain corporates with hurricane […]

It’s time for another fortnightly look at the Swiss Re Cat Bond Performance Indices to see how they have performed and what their movement can tell us about the mood and sentiment within the insurance-linked securities market or reinforce from our other recent articles. Last time we looked at the indices they had both dropped […]

Another busy week of news in the markets we cover has passed. This week we covered the launch of a Bermuda based cat bond issuance platform promising low-cost low-friction issuance for all, we also wrote about the plans of the TWIA to access the cat bond market during 2012 and another private cat bond issuance, […]

This year has been much harder than normal for the managers of cat bond funds and insurance-linked securities funds. More used to giving their investors great, non-correlated returns on a regular, monthly basis, cat bond funds have had to get used to monthly declines and a pattern of negative returns over the course of 2011.

The companies behind the R4 Rural Resilience Initiative weather-index microinsurance pilot program, which is currently operating in Ethiopia but plans to expand, have announced that the first successful payout to policyholders has been successfully made. Over 1,800 farmers in seven villages experienced drought conditions that triggered a payout under the terms of their index-based insurance […]

The floods in Thailand could be the largest loss caused by flooding this decade, according to a representative of Allianz. In this news article, Lutz Fullgraf, Allianz’s CEO for global corporate and specialty in the Asian region, suggested that this will be the largest flood loss for years. We’d offer that it could be the […]

Bermuda based holding company Dunamis Holdings Ltd. has just announced the launch of Kalista, a cost-effective platform for efficiently issuing catastrophe bond transactions. Kalista launches as a result of the combined efforts of Dunamis, Limestone Law, a Bermuda law firm, the Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSX) and a Bermuda reinsurer (presumably Dunamis Re, the soon to […]

We’ve written a lot about the potential for flood risks to be structured and sold as catastrophe bonds on Artemis. You can read some of our more recent articles on this topic here and here. Still there is no sign in the cat bond pipeline of anyone putting together a flood cat bond but we’re […]

Two days ago it was announced that Credit Suisse would be fully integrating its Swiss private banking offshoot Clariden Leu into its organisation. Clariden Leu, who operate a number of insurance-linked securities investment funds, came into existence through the merger of five private banking subsidiaries of Credit Suisse. Now the parent company is pulling them […]

The increasingly changeable and unpredictable climate is exactly what weather hedging, using instruments such as weather derivatives, was designed to protect companies against. Weather risk management can hep you protect your bottom line if you’re a business who stands to lose if the weather varies from historical norms. Most of the time it works very […]