Linked Investments

The Handbook of Insurance-Linked Securities (The Wiley Finance Series)
$100.00
With very little written on the subject, I was looking forward to reading this book. My general feeling about the book is disappointment. The book is certainly not a handbook on the topic.

Several chapters are written extremely well. Guy Coughlan's review of longevity risk transfer is excellent. Cameron Heath provides a good description of how rating agencies approach insurance-linked securities. And then there are chapters with small mistakes or just poorly written. (To be fair, I haven't read it all.) There is little consistency. There are overlaps between chapters. There are important topics missing altogether. The editors either have familiarity with only some of the ILS topics, or did not do a good job of selecting authors and actual editing.

It might be that my expectations were too high, leading to the feeling of disappointment in the book. I would not buy the book if I had to pay even a dollar. Luckily, my company wasted the money instead of me. I am giving it a rating of 2 instead of 1 because it is good to see any book on the subject.

Life Markets: Trading Mortality and Longevity Risk with Life Settlements and Linked Securities (Wiley Finance)
$90.00
A complete guide to longevity finance As the Baby Boomer population continues to age and the need for the securitization of life insurance policies increases, more financial institutions are looking towards longevity trading as a solution. Consequently, there is now a need for innovative financial products and strategies that have the ability to hedge longevity exposure for pension funds, reinsurance companies, and governments. These products and strategies are currently being developed with the use of life settlements. Here, author Vishaal Bhuyan provides a complete guide to this burgeoning sector. In Life Markets, Bhuyan and a team of expert contributors from leading firms offer an extensive look at how to trade life settlements. Provides practical guidance to the growing field of longevity finance Outlines the innovative financial products that are populating this field Highlights a safe haven for investors seeking returns in troubled times Covering everything from the history of life settlements to making a transaction-pricing, service providers, exchanges, and more-this book contains extensive coverage of the many issues surrounding longevity finance.

Optimal stopping behavior of equity-linked investment products with regime switching [An article from: Insurance Mathematics and Economics]
$8.95
This digital document is a journal article from Insurance Mathematics and Economics, published by Elsevier in . The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
In recent years, there is a growing interest in equity-linked investment products. The return credited to such product depends on the return of some underlying reference index. A prominent example is the equity-indexed annuities (EIAs). A special feature of many of the equity-linked products is that the holders are entitled the right to surrender the product prior to maturity. In this paper, we will study the optimal surrender time for a equity-linked product in a discrete-time setting. We assume that the market environment will switch among different regimes in a Markovian way, and the return of the reference index will have different distributions in different regimes. Assuming a CRRA preference, we have obtained the optimal surrender policy. Properties of the optimal surrender behavior, in particular the effect of regime switching, are examined.

Investment Guarantees: The New Science of Modeling and Risk Management for Equity-Linked Life Insurance
$124.50
The blend of econometrics, finance and math is fair enough. It's readable for both finance and non-finance people. There can be certain ways to make the book more pratical:

1.While I understand the result of the calibrations, I'm afraid that I can't replicate the results. The calibration steps should be outlined.

2.Since most of the calibration results are done by excel, the author can explain more how to do it by excel; or simply post the excel examples at the author's website. That is something that many people are doing.

3. The regime-switching model, while drawing a lot of attention in academic, is still not popular. There is still not enough evidence that it outperforms the traditional ARIMA models. In fact, it's the opposite. More pages should be spent on ARIMA.