Archive for June, 2013

The attractiveness of catastrophe reinsurance risk as an alternative investment opportunity continues to spread, helped by the increasingly high-profile nature of the asset class. Catastrophe bonds, insurance-linked securities (ILS) funds and reinsurance-linked investment funds are driving the asset class profile to investors you may once have thought out of reach.

The subject of correlation among asset classes is one which can get institutional investors excited. In financial circles, correlation is a measure of how two different investments move in relation to one another and is often used to describe how specific market or global events can affect two different kinds of asset class.

Equity research analysts at Nomura, the Japanese investment bank and financial group, are the latest to cover the reinsurance sector and cite the impact of third-party capital inflows on the reinsurance market. Nomura forecasts a soft market by early 2014 for U.S. property and casualty (P&C) lines with reinsurance leading the market down with new […]

The 2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season has its first tropical storm of the season which formed just five days into the six month long tropical season. As we suggested here last Friday, the disturbance in the southern Gulf of Mexico, largely consisting of remnants of Pacific storm Barbara, has now developed into the first storm of […]

The month of May in the United States saw two separate severe weather events which will each result in losses to the insurance industry of over a billion dollars, according to the latest monthly Global Catastrophe Recap report from Impact Forecasting, the cat modelling division of reinsurance broker Aon Benfield.

Interesting news has emerged today via an article in Hedge Fund Alert which reports that Deutsche Bank is in the process of setting up its own insurance-linked securities (ILS) fund. We heard some market whispers to this effect a couple of months ago ourselves in discussions with people close to the bank, so with this […]

Rating agency Moody’s Investor Services has published a new version of its methodology and criteria for rating catastrophe bond transactions. The document, published yesterday, consolidates  into a single document and replaces several older publications which defined Moody’s approach to rating cat bonds.

Bermuda based global insurance and reinsurance group AXIS Capital Holdings Limited has announced a new appointment to head up its activities in third-party reinsurance capital management. Ben Rubin, previously in investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has been hired as Executive Vice President, Capital Markets at AXIS Capital.

Every Wednesday morning we send out our weekly email newsletter which contains every story that you may have missed from the last seven days. You can sign up for the newsletter here. In case you missed anything in the last week, here are all of the news stories and articles we published over the last […]

Two of the most respected hurricane forecasters have updated their predictions for the 2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season today. The Colorado State University team has kept the number of storms and hurricanes it forecasts the same, but says its confidence in the forecast has increased. Meanwhile Tropical Storm Risk has very slightly increased its forecast numbers.