Research & Reports

Just as we were getting back into the swing of things after the holidays, there was a sharp decline in the stock market, which prompted us to think of what the implications could be for...

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...

In this report we’ll discuss deferred income annuities (DIAs), products that, in our view, were built to provide less risky forms of guaranteed income as compared to living benefits, and to answer longstanding objections to...

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,...