Options-based “synthetic annuities” give investors the ability to generate higher returns, provide better downside protection, and utilize risk more efficiently than pure stock and bond-based portfolios. Now, this strategy’s creator shows exactly how to use them to support a wide range of trading and investing goals. Hedge fund manager Michael Lovelady shows how synthetic annuities blend the best features of traditional portfolios with the risk management discipline of quantitative investing, increasing current yields while also reducing volatility. Michael presents this new strategy with unique graphics and simplified models that any investor or trader can use, and demonstrates its value in the context of today’s key market trends. He illuminates the entire “ecosystem” of theories, products, and tools surrounding synthetic annuities, and shows exactly how to integrate them with other investment and portfolio management techniques.

Options-based "synthetic annuities" give investors the ability to generate higher returns, provide better downside protection, and utilize risk more efficiently than pure stock and bond-based portfolios. Now, this strategy's creator shows exactly how to use them to support a wide range of trading and investing goals. Hedge fund manager Michael Lovelady shows how synthetic annuities blend the best features of traditional portfolios with the risk management discipline of quantitative investing, increasing current yields while also reducing volatility. Michael presents this new strategy with unique graphics and simplified models that any investor or trader can use, and demonstrates its value in the context of today's key market trends. He illuminates the entire "ecosystem" of theories, products, and tools surrounding synthetic annuities, and shows exactly how to integrate them with other investment and portfolio management techniques.

This book makes quantitative finance (almost) easy! Its new visual approach makes quantitative finance accessible to a broad audience, including those without strong backgrounds in math or finance. Michael Lovelady introduces a simplified but powerful technique for calculating profit probabilities and graphically representing the outcomes. Lovelady's "pictures" highlight key characteristics of structured securities such as the increased likelihood of profits, the level of virtual dividends being generated, and market risk exposures. After explaining his visual approach, he applies it to one of today's hottest investing trends: lower-volatility, higher-income strategies. Because of today's intense interest in alternative investments and structured securities, this book reviews their unique advantages to investors, managers and advisors of retail and institutional portfolios. Visual Quantitative Finance focuses on key topics directly related to the design, pricing and communication of structured securities, including stochastic price projections and the framework underlying options pricing formulas. The key is Lovelady's explicit use of probabilities in a spreadsheet format. By working directly with the underlying assumptions, he transforms the Black-Scholes framework into five columns of a simple Excel spreadsheet, with no complicated formulas -- making structured securities far more intuitive to design, evaluate and manage. For all investors, students, and financial professionals who are interested in quantitative finance, risk measurement, options pricing, structured securities, or financial model building - and for everyone who needs to explain these topics to someone else. For those with quantitative backgrounds, this guide offers powerful new tools for design and risk management, simplifying the design and evaluation of innovative instruments. For everyone else, Lovelady makes the subject comprehensible for the first time.

The Pension Crisis concerns the changing demographic profile of the economy: an increasing number of elderly persons supported by fewer young people. Governments around the world are responding to this impending crisis by shifting their pension policies away from pay-as-you-go systems towards individual savings schemes. These savings need to be converted into a pension at retirement, and annuities provide this function. This book is a comprehensive study of annuity markets. The book starts by outlining the context of public policy towards pensions, and explains the different types of annuities available, focusing on the UK which has the largest annuity market in the world. It examines how annuities are priced, and describes the techniques of mortality measurement. As a background, it provides a history of annuities, and the experience of annuity markets in a number of other countries. The book outlines the economic theory behind annuities, and explains how annuities insure consumers against longevity risks. It goes on to describes how annuities markets function: how they work, and whether they are efficient, leading onto a discussion of the annuity puzzle. The book concludes by discussing the regulatory framework, assets available to back annuity liabilities, and recent developments in annuity markets.

This bulletin presents announcements of official rulings and procedures, treasury decisions, executive orders, tax conventions, legislation, and court decisions. It also contains other items of general interest intended to promote a uniform application of the tax laws.

"The provision of annuities and other benefits during the decumulation phase DC pension plans raises major policy issues. As the private markets for annuities and disability benefits are not well developed even in the most advanced OECD countries, the resolution of these issues is likely to be a gradual process, with both countries and markets learning through experience" -- title page.

A comprehensive guide to investment guarantees in equity-linked life insurance Due to the convergence of financial and insurance markets, new forms of investment guarantees are emerging which require financial service professionals to become savvier in modeling and risk management. With chapters that discuss stock return models, dynamic hedging, risk measures, Markov Chain Monte Carlo estimation, and much more, this one-stop reference contains the valuable insights and proven techniques that will allow readers to better understand the theory and practice of investment guarantees and equity-linked insurance policies. Mary Hardy, PhD (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo and is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and an Associate of the Society of Actuaries, where she is a frequent speaker. Her research covers topics in life insurance solvency and risk management, with particular emphasis on equity-linked insurance. Hardy is an Associate Editor of the North American Actuarial Journal and the ASTIN Bulletin and is a Deputy Editor of the British Actuarial Journal.

Two fundamentally different philosophies for retirement income planning, which I call probability-based and safety-first, diverge on the critical issue of where a retirement plan is best served: in the risk/reward trade-offs of a diversified and aggressive investment portfolio that relies primarily on the stock market, or in the contractual protections of insurance products that integrate the power of risk pooling and actuarial science alongside investments. The probability-based approach is generally better understood by the public. It advocates using an aggressive investment portfolio with a large allocation to stocks to meet retirement goals. My earlier book How Much Can I Spend in Retirement? A Guide to Investment-Based Retirement Strategies provides an extensive investigation of probability-based approaches. But this investments-only attitude is not the optimal way to build a retirement income plan. There are pitfalls in retirement that we are less familiar with during the accumulation years. The nature of risk changes. Longevity risk is the possibility of living longer than planned, which could mean not having resources to maintain the retiree's standard of living. And once retirement distributions begin, market downturns in the early years can disproportionately harm retirement sustainability. This is sequence-of-returns risk, and it acts to amplify the impacts of market volatility in retirement. Traditional wealth management is not equipped to handle these new risks in a fulfilling way. More assets are required to cover spending goals over a possibly costly retirement triggered by a long life and poor market returns. And yet, there is no assurance that assets will be sufficient. For retirees who are worried about outliving their wealth, probability-based strategies can become excessively conservative and stressful. This book focuses on the other option: safety-first retirement planning. Safety-first advocates support a more bifurcated approach to building retirement income plans that integrates insurance with investments, providing lifetime income protections to cover spending. With risk pooling through insurance, retirees effectively pay an insurance premium that will provide a benefit to support spending in otherwise costly retirements that could deplete an unprotected investment portfolio. Insurance companies can pool sequence and longevity risks across a large base of retirees, much like a traditional defined-benefit company pension plan or Social Security, allowing for retirement spending that is more closely aligned with averages. When bonds are replaced with insurance-based risk pooling assets, retirees can improve the odds of meeting their spending goals while also supporting more legacy at the end of life, especially in the event of a longer-than-average retirement. We walk through this thought process and logic in steps, investigating three basic ways to fund a retirement spending goal: with bonds, with a diversified investment portfolio, and with risk pooling through annuities and life insurance. We consider the potential role for different types of annuities including simple income annuities, variable annuities, and fixed index annuities. I explain how different annuities work and how readers can evaluate them. We also examine the potential for whole life insurance to contribute to a retirement income plan. When we properly consider the range of risks introduced after retirement, I conclude that the integrated strategies preferred by safety-first advocates support more efficient retirement outcomes. Safety-first retirement planning helps to meet financial goals with less worry. This book explains how to evaluate different insurance options and implement these solutions into an integrated retirement plan.