Research & Reports
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...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from October, 2011
The month of October was an active one in terms of variable insurance fund filings with the SEC, and we strongly suspect that a number of the changes were connected with product initiatives insurers have...
Update: Selected Guaranteed Minimum Income Benefits
This grid updates our coverage of selected Guaranteed Minimum Income Benefits (GMIBs), including references to some riders that were recently closed…
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...
Update: Summaries of Contingent Annuity Products
This table updates our coverage of contingent annuity products filed with the SEC since they were first introduced to the industry…
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from September, 2011
Last month we saw a nice batch of new variable insurance funds registered with the SEC, quite a few of them containing risk-levered components that we think were designed to be used in connection with...