Research & Reports

Each year we provide, with our last issue of December, a quick rundown of how the variable annuity business performed so far, from our perspective, and a few forward-looking thoughts for the New Year. While...

Industry research firms began reporting third quarter sales not long ago, and the numbers confirmed our earlier suspicions, that variable annuity sales would fell in the quarter, while total industry output was sustained through a...

We just completed our third quarter review of variable annuity business results of selected stock-traded insurers and found that for all of them, sales fell sequentially during that time period. Market volatility was the most-often...

In this commentary we’ll cover a topic we haven’t visited for a while: structured annuities, as a few new ones were filed with the SEC recently, some of them updates to existing contracts. We’ll also...

It seems like the year is going by very fast – the third quarter is winding down already and yet, in our view, it’s hard to forecast how the variable annuity business will finish up...

Not long ago, first quarter annuity industry sales figures were released by the major tracking firms and we thought results were about as expected – although we were thinking fixed annuities would do better…

Last week we attended the annual LIMRA/LOMA/Society of Actuaries Retirement Industry Conference held in Washington, D.C., and in this commentary, as we have done in the past, we won’t try to completely recap the event,...

We reviewed fourth quarter and full-year 2014 annuity industry sales and they came out pretty much as we expected they would – variable annuity production was down but fixed annuities, led by those of the...

Each year we devote the last commentary of December to taking a quick look back at the past year in the variable annuity business, and we’ll do so again this time, and also make some...