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Research & Reports

Soleares Research, LLC is a market research and consulting firm servicing the annuity and life insurance businesses. We provide, through our website, periodic articles that cover important industry trends; we also offer clients phone or on-site consultations, executive briefings and presentations. We pride ourselves on first-class customer service and responsiveness to our clients. We aim to be an indispensable resource to the marketplace.
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A Season of Change – In Which VA Insurers Are Moving Tentatively

Many variable annuity issuers have been filing changes to their products – mostly of the de-risking variety – but they have not taken what we would call drastic measures. We think this is because most...

A Quick Look Back – on 2011 and its Significance for the VA Industry

As we have done in the past, we reserved our last weekly commentary of this year for a reflection on how the variable annuity business performed in 2011. It is our way of getting a...

Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from November, 2011

In this report we’ll provide our usual highlights of recent variable fund filings, and comment on the announcement today from Sun Life Financial that it will discontinue sales of variable annuities in the U.S. To...

Winding Down – There May Be More Surprises Before the Year Ends

As we write this, product filing activity around the variable annuity business has slowed down a bit, but there remain numerous modifications in the pipeline, quite a few of them not scheduled to come out...

Questions Linger – as to Where the VA Industry, Certain Players are Headed

We think these are rather uncertain times for the variable annuity space: companies are cutting back in one form or another – actually many pending product changes have yet to be fully revealed – and,...

“Headwinds” – Market Doldrums Caused Problems for VA Issuers in 3Q11

Earnings season for stock-traded insurers we monitor regularly has concluded, and, for the most part, variable annuity sales for those companies fell, due to a combination of factors that have become familiar to anyone following...

“Trick or Treat” – a Bag Full of De-Risking, Fire Sales, and a Market Bounce

If we were to liken the variable annuity industry to a ship on the high seas, we’d have to say it has been tossed around by contrary winds of late. Choppy equity markets and low...

Evaluating Q3 – and How the Variable Annuity Industry Performed

Now that the third quarter has concluded, we’ve started estimating how the variable annuity industry might have fared over that time period. From what we’re hearing, it looks like troubling conditions in the financial markets...

GLWB Variations – Latest Designs, Tweaks, Reflect Competitive Realities

Lately there’s been a mixture of activity involving variable annuity Guaranteed Lifetime Withdrawal Benefits (GLWBs). A few insurers have been trimming back on the generosity of their riders, but the industry is not in full...