Archive for November, 2012

The trend for reinsurers to launch vehicles providing alternative forms of reinsurance capital continues apace, with sidecars, catastrophe funds, insurance-linked security funds and collateralized reinsurance vehicles, being backed by some of the largest traditional reinsurance firms this year. With more of this activity on the horizon from other stalwarts of the traditional reinsurance sector it’s […]

Over a month ago we covered investment manager Dexion Capital’s plans to expand and grow their DCG Iris Ltd. insurance-linked security fund through a series of share offerings. The ILS fund, which launched back in June, has its shares listed on the London stock Exchange (LSE) and acts as a feeder fund and invests all […]

Interesting news today as Endurance Specialty Holdings Ltd., the Bermuda-based specialty property and casualty insurance and reinsurance provider, announces that it has bought weather risk management solutions specialist Galileo Weather Risk Management. Endurance has acquired the assets of Galileo and hired all of its employees and this will now become the foundation of Endurance’s launch […]

As we reported last week here, according to insight from Willis Capital Markets & Advisory (WCMA) the strong levels of primary catastrophe bond issuance in 2012 has now taken the cat bond market to an all time high in terms of size. That was one of the key insights from their recently published Q3 2012 ILS […]

PERILS AG, the Zurich-based independent provider of industry-wide European catastrophe insurance data and loss indices, has published an update on its progress and how widely used its data has become. The service has a primary focus on European windstorm loss data and indices for construction of industry-loss based catastrophe bonds, ILW’s and private transactions, but […]

Here’s another example of the successful application of parametric weather-index based insurance techniques in developing economies. Insurer Jubilee Insurance recently made payouts under their weather index insurance scheme to over 200 cotton farmers in Baringo County, Kenya for their losses suffered after crops failed due to a lack of measured rainfall.

So the post-Sandy recovery of secondary market prices of outstanding catastrophe bonds has begun on cat bonds which aren’t exposed, but the last week saw further declines in both price and total returns. This is likely a reaction to increasing pessimism regarding the industry losses from the storm and also a downgrade of one exposed […]

At a time when the catastrophe bond market is still uncertain about the impact, or otherwise, of hurricane Sandy on exposed cat bond notes it is encouraging to hear that demand for new issuance remains high. The latest cat bond deal to be marketed in 2012 is the 19th Residential Re transaction from regular sponsor […]

The insurance industry loss estimate from hurricane and post-tropical storm Sandy rose again last week. Still, the impact on reinsurers, reinsurance-linked funds and any catastrophe bonds is unclear. As always, you can read every market news story and article on the Artemis news blog, subscribe to our weekly email newsletter update and for your convenience […]

A new investment management firm, formed this year and headquartered in New York, is launching two reinsurance-linked investment funds targeting investors looking for either a medium yield or high yield approach to reinsurance investing. Stone Ridge Asset Management is led by CEO Ross Stevens, a former Magnatar Capital co-head of portfolio management. We understand that […]