Cat bond fund news

Twelve Capital, a Zurich-headquartered insurance and reinsurance focused investment manager, has announced a key hire for its catastrophe bond team, with former Credit Suisse ILS employee Tanja Wrosch joining to head up portfolio management for cat bonds.

The landscape of insurance-linked securities (ILS) fund products is relatively broad and diverse, even though the majority of ILS funds are crowded into similar sizes and target similar levels of risk, meaning that, for investors, there is value in considering multiple ILS allocations, according to SIGLO Capital Advisors AG.

Helped by the recent spread widening seen in the catastrophe bond market, the overall market yield in US dollars has reached almost 13.5% again, which is the highest level the return potential of the cat bond market has been at in over eight months.

The catastrophe bonds that have seen the biggest price moves in recent weeks appear to be those that have seen their expected losses rise the most when remodelled using the RMS V23 update, according to Plenum Investments.

The catastrophe bond market underwent a further phase of spread widening in the last week, with industry-loss index trigger cat bonds leading the way again and now, the wider spreads are being cited as an opportunity for investors to enter the market by Icosa Investments.

New rules have been implemented in the United States by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that shorten the standard settlement cycle for most broker-dealer transactions from the current “T+2” to “T+1”, but in our discussions with catastrophe bond trading desks and market participants, the general feeling is one of readiness.

Fermat Capital Management, one of the largest specialist investment managers of catastrophe bonds and insurance-linked securities (ILS) assets, launched a new UCITS cat bond fund strategy earlier this year in February, which we’ve learned has already grown above $530 million in assets.

Having only launched its business at the beginning of this year, Icosa Investments, the Swiss catastrophe bond focused investment manager launched by co-founders the former Twelve Capital executive Florian Steiger and Swiss financial services and capital markets specialist Jordan Nickerson, has already surpassed $100 million in assets.

It is notable how the recent update of one of the main hurricane risk models triggered a wave of selling in the catastrophe bond market, investment manager Tenax Capital has commented.

Third-party investor capital under management in reinsurance joint-ventures and insurance-linked securities (ILS) funds managed by RenaissanceRe’s Capital Partners division has now eclipsed the $7 billion mark, to reach $7.17 billion at the end of the first-quarter, while the managers cat bond fund surpassed $2 billion for the first time.