Research & Reports
VA Insurers Are Revising Their Benefits to “Ratchet Down” Risk
To continue discussing our theme of last week, we’re sure that current financial market conditions are forcing variable annuity insurers to re-evaluate the living benefit guarantees they are selling. Third quarter results should provide us...
Musing on the State of Variable Annuities During the Current Market Turmoil
Recently we’ve been contemplating the “value proposition” of the variable annuity, how the product might be positioned and sold given the existing market climate. Earnings season is now underway and we think results from last...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from September, 2008
In this commentary we’ll return to our regular task of covering highlights of variable insurance fund filings from the past month, and in September we saw a wide variety of modifications made to platforms –...
Making Sense of All the Movement – VA Contracts, Riders Set for Q4 Debuts
This week we’ll comment on an assortment of recent product moves within the variable annuity space, and we must say that we aren’t seeing a major slowdown in the rate of activity, as there are...
Competition, Downturns, Volatility – What’s Been on People’s Minds in Q3
The third quarter is coming to a close and it was a rough one for the financial markets, to say the least. Throughout that time we’ve had informal discussions with our industry contacts as to...
Update: Summaries of New VA Contracts Filed in 2007
This grid updates our coverage of variable annuity contracts initially registered with the SEC in 2007…
Variable Annuity Contract Notes: Checking Back in on the Newest Registrations
Over the past several weeks we’ve taken some time to pore over new variable annuity contract registrations, including those we started monitoring last year, and in this commentary we’ll discuss what we learned from that...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from August, 2008
This week we return to our monthly task of commenting on SEC filings related to variable insurance portfolios, and during August we noticed interesting new registrations and amendments that we believe have a direct connection...
An Update – Directions in Variable Annuity Guaranteed Living Benefit Assets
Recently we devoted some more time to sifting through insurers’ financial documents to gather data on variable annuity guaranteed living benefit account values, because we believe the data provide clues as to product priorities around...