Insurance-linked investments

With the catastrophe bond market pipeline having sprung back to life as the US wind season passes its meteorological peak, cat bond fund manager Icosa Investments AG has analysed the issuance trend and sees it still running at a record pace.

Catastrophe bond funds in the UCITS format grew strongly in recent months, adding approximately 7% in assets during the third-quarter of 2024 to take their combined assets under management to a new record high of almost $13.05 billion.

Twelve Capital, the Zurich-headquartered insurance-linked securities (ILS), catastrophe bond and reinsurance investment manager, has reached a new milestone in terms of third-party assets under management, surpassing $4 billion for the very first time across its cat bond and ILS portfolios.

Recent Atlantic hurricane activity is likely to only drive “limited” losses to top-layer insurance-linked securities (ILS) strategies, such as catastrophe bonds, but will contribute to keeping spreads in the ILS asset class “historically high”, Schroders Capital’s Nils Rode has said.

At MS Amlin, there is an ambition to grow and broaden the scope of the innovative Phoenix reinsurance sidecar series of deals, and William Ho, the CEO of MS Amlin Asia Pacific, told us about the opportunity this presents to investors.

K2 Advisors, the hedge fund focused investment management unit of Franklin Templeton, has maintained its overweight view on the catastrophe bond and broader insurance-linked securities (ILS) asset class for the fourth-quarter, citing opportunities it sees in the market as well as the still historically high yields that are available.

Recognising that demand for asset and wealth management services are set to increase and that certain alternative asset classes are currently less attractive due to their taxation, the government of Hong Kong aims to boost its investment sector with a broadening of profit tax exemptions, with insurance-linked securities (ILS) one asset class in focus.

The broadly diversified portfolio of insurance-linked securities (ILS) and reinsurance investments managed by pension investment firm PGGM on behalf of end-client the Dutch pension PFZW, delivered a 5.8% return for the third-quarter, lifting year-to-date returns to 11.7%.

It’s now clear that catastrophe bond funds fell far less than the market benchmark on the first pricing after hurricane Milton, with the Plenum CAT Bond UCITS Fund Indices only falling 0.42% at Friday October 11th and the majority of cat bond funds absorbing the initial mark-to-market impacts of the storm within two weeks of […]

Highlighting the still wide-range of uncertainty in insurance market loss estimates after hurricane Milton, catastrophe bond investment manager Icosa Investments AG has noted that the cat bond market seems not to have discounted prices as widely to account for uncertainty this time.