Archive for January, 2014

AQR Re Management, Ltd., an affiliate of global investments firm AQR Capital Management, LLC, has launched a new catastrophe reinsurance fund and grown its reinsurance-linked assets under management at the beginning of the year.

Here are the ten most popular news articles, week ending 19th January 2014, on catastrophe bonds, reinsurance capital and related risk transfer topics, from the last seven days on Artemis. To ensure you never miss a thing  subscribe to the weekly Artemis email newsletter updates.

According to market sources the pricing on health insurer Aetna’s Vitality Re V Ltd. (Series 2014-1), its latest medical benefit claims ratio linked insurance-linked security (ILS), has settled below the bottom of the deals launch price guidance range.

Zurich headquartered global reinsurance firm Swiss Re recently shared some interesting data on the ratio between catastrophe bond spread payments earned by investors and total losses to the investor base from cat bonds triggered by natural catastrophes.

At an insurance summit held yesterday in Orlando, Jack Nicholson the COO of the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund said that it is seeking approval to buy up to $1.5 billion of private reinsurance, and favors using catastrophe bonds and collateralized reinsurance.

John Nelson, Chairman of the Lloyd’s insurance and reinsurance market in London, said in an interview that the changing reinsurance market dynamic, caused by capital from new sources flowing into the sector, is a major challenge to Lloyd’s.

Bermuda based short-tail and speciality lines reinsurance firm Montpelier Re has named ex-Barclay’s exec Daniel Brookman as Head of Capital Markets and COO of its third-party capital and reinsurance-linked asset manager Blue Capital Management Ltd.

Despite the distinctly soft insurance-linked securities and catastrophe bond market, with prices having declined by as much as 40% on comparable issues in the last year, the insurance return from an ILS portfolio hit the second highest level ever in 2013.

The market in exchange traded snowfall derivatives has all but ground to a halt, according to a report from CNN, resulting in not even a single snowfall-linked weather derivative contract being traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) in 2013.

Zurich based catastrophe bond investment manager Plenum Investments is expanding its reach with the launch of a higher return leveraged cat bond investment strategy as well as new institutional and trailer fee clean retail share classes for the Plenum Cat Bond Fund.