Catastrophe bond fund news

A newly developed set of catastrophe bond fund indices from Swiss asset manager Plenum Investments clearly shows how, in general, cat bond funds and returns have recovered back to June levels, so gaining back most of the value that had been lost due to high selling-pressure in the marketplace.

Plenum Investments, the Zurich based specialist catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities (ILS) investment manager, has published a new market study and Index family, enabling UCITS cat bond funds to be compared for the first time, while improving the transparency of the cat bond marketplace.

In recent months, if you’re interested in insurance-linked securities (ILS) or active in the ILS marketplace, you could not have missed the widely discussed issues of spread widening seen in catastrophe bonds, or the hardening of reinsurance pricing and how that spills over to ILS rates and returns.

GAM Holding AG, the parent company to global asset manager GAM Investments, reported an impressive roughly US $500 million of net inflows to its catastrophe bond strategies in the first-half of 2022, including the funds managed by specialist Fermat Capital Management.

For global reinsurance firm RenaissanceRe, the Medici catastrophe bond focused investment fund strategy has been one of its sources of growth in third-party capital assets under management in recent years, a trend that continued in 2022.

Some catastrophe bond funds have been able to moderate the impacts of broadly widening spreads through their diversification in recent weeks, with diversifying perils and regions experiencing less significant widening on outstanding cat bonds, so delivering better returns in May and June.

The assets under management (AUM) of the main UCITS catastrophe bond funds as a group only rose by 1.2% through the first-half of 2022, which goes some way to explain the restricted capacity of recent months.

The catastrophe bond market, which has experienced a prolonged period of spread widening through much of the second-quarter, is now seemingly becoming more balanced, as a greater equilibrium between supply and demand is found, resulting in more attractive execution for four recent cat bond sponsors.

A general shortage of reinsurance capacity for some peak zone perils, particularly US wind, has been a particularly decisive factor in driving the recent spread widening in the catastrophe bond market, resulting in much higher cat bond yields, specialist investment manager Plenum has explained.

For investors considering entering the catastrophe bond market, or increasing their allocations to it, during this period of multi-year high cat bond spreads, “speed is of the essence” according to investment manager Twelve Capital, as this opportunity won’t last for long.