Archive for November, 2012

Insurer USAA, a regular visitor to the catastrophe bond market through their Residential Re series of deals, has released an estimated range for their ultimate net loss (UNL) from hurricane Sandy. As one of, if not the most, prolific primary insurer cat bond sponsors, the estimate will be welcomed by investors in the asset class. […]

The CATCo Reinsurance Opportunities Fund has a new non-executive director and chairman after the incembent resigned from the post to prevent future conflicts of interest. Anthony Taylor handed in his notice with effect from today, 5th November, after advising the board of that his involvement with a small but growing portfolio of collateralised reinsurance businesses […]

A week ago we wrote that as hurricane Sandy approached landfall on the U.S. northeast coast both of the Swiss Re Cat Bond Performance Indices declined, the first time we’d seen a dual decline since March. Given that this drop was prior to landfall it was clear that we would see an even larger decline […]

Hurricane Sandy dominated our coverage last week and kept us extremely busy. The market now awaits the verdict on whether there are meaningful impacts to catastrophe bonds and reinsurers. 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 […]

Sources tell us that one of the catastrophe bonds that has been considered to be at risk from losses due to hurricane Sandy may actually be safe, after an early loss estimate suggested no loss of principal to any of the classes of cat bond notes. As we wrote in an article published yesterday where […]

Once again a northeast U.S. hurricane has been a major flood catastrophe event. This happened last year with hurricane Irene which saw the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program, pick up a significant portion of the economic losses from the storm. It’s expected that this will also happen with Sandy and this has once again highlighted […]

Greenlight Re, the Cayman Islands domiciled reinsurer backed by hedge fund manager David Einhorn, has shown how the aggressive investment strategies that hedge fund reinsurers can employ when necessary can help to offset any issues on the underwriting side of the business. In their latest quarterly results Greenlight revealed an underwriting hit from commercial auto […]

SAC Re the Bermuda based Class 4 reinsurer backed by Steven A. Cohen, the billionaire hedge fund manager and founder of SAC Capital Advisors LP, has announced four new hires as they build up their teams capabilities. The hedge fund backed reinsurance play launched in July having raised $500m of capital in a private placement […]

Here’s an interesting side-story on Sandy where a U.S. state schools pension fund was in the path of hurricane Sandy, Pennsylvania was a state impacted by the storm, and now also faces a potential impairment to their investment portfolio because they have invested in a reinsurance-linked investment fund. The Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System, […]

Risk modelling firm EQECAT have just issued an updated estimate of losses from hurricane Sandy now including post-landfall observations and analysis. EQECAT were the first modelling firm to come out with an early pre-landfall estimate of losses on Monday that pegged the insured loss at somewhere in the range of $5 billion to $10 billion. […]