insurance derivatives

The anticipated Shanghai Insurance Exchange could launch as early as this weekend, according to reports in Chinese news media. While product specifics remain private, reports suggest the exchange will facilitate insurance derivatives and other forms of risk securitization at some stage.

Local Chinese news media reports that a launch of the Shanghai Insurance Exchange is edging ever nearer, with a reported 91 companies having agreed to contribute a combined $343 million (2.235bn yuan) of capital to launch the exchange.

The city of Shanghai in China has been slowly establishing itself as an international financial center and wants to reach that goal by 2020. The insurance industry lags behind banking and securities though and so plans are underway to change that. One of the initiatives being worked on is the planning of an insurance exchange […]

Remember HURLOs? Hurricane Risk Landfall Options? They were launched in October 2008 by Weather Risk Solutions, LLC (WRS) and promised a mutualized marketplace for hurricane options (our previous coverage here and here). To date they’ve been dabbled with by investment professionals but we haven’t heard a great deal more until today.

Axis Capital, the Bermudian reinsurer, has announced in its preliminary third-quarter results that it expects to lose around $136m due to a longevity risk derivative contract. The final loss will be unveiled in the reinsurers official third-quarter results filing. The derivative contract doesn’t expire until 2017 but Axis will have to carry those losses on […]

A very interesting new hurricane risk instrument has come to light today in a press release from Weather Risk Solutions, LLC (WRS). The full press release is available here. HuRLOs are Hurricane Risk Landfall Options, a new derivative product devised by WRS which will begin trading on October 7th using their electronic trading platform and […]

India has long been at the forefront of weather risk protection with ICICI Lombard leading the way with it’s monsoon rainfall protection policies for local farmers. Now they have said that they intend to bring out catastrophe products for farmers as well to help protect them from other natural hazards such as floods. This could […]

Gustav is still traversing the Caribbean this morning. Jamaica bore the brunt of it’s near hurricane force winds a few hours ago and the Caymans are next in it’s path. Interest in catastrophe options such as cat-in-a-box deals has risen considerably with offshore oil platform owners getting nervous and checking out the potential pricing of […]

Hurricane Gustav is currently not a hurricane, the storm was downgraded to a tropical storm after stalling over Haiti which took more power out of it than was originally expected. The time spent over Haiti has also moved the track of Gustav and he’s now heading straight for Jamaica. Maximum sustained winds are currently around […]

Tropical Storm Fay moved across the middle of the Florida panhandle today bringing with her sustained winds of up to 65mph, heavy rains of 5 to 10 inches and the odd tornado. Despite being over land for most of the day her winds haven’t weakened much and she is still capable of causing some havoc […]