Research & Reports

It’s once again time for us to check in on what’s been happening with variable insurance funds, and during December there wasn’t a great deal of filing activity with the SEC, but that’s normal for...

When fourth quarter variable annuity sales results come out, we’re convinced they will reflect a lack of participation by the industry in the improving equity markets – much as was the case in the prior...

We continue to see an interesting mix of variable annuity contracts and features coming out, some following the trend towards the simpler and cheaper, others more fully loaded. Regardless of this diversity, we firmly believe...

This grid, an update of one we last published in October, contains summaries of 55 variable annuity contracts (not including certain individual share class options) initially registered with the SEC in 2009…

In the past, we have employed comparisons with the sporting world to describe competitive conditions in the variable annuity space, and we’re going to do so again in this, our first commentary of the New...

This spreadsheet contains our coverage of noteworthy variable annuity product changes that occurred this year…

It’s become our custom to dedicate our last commentary each year to looking back at how the variable annuity business performed, to get the evaluation process started before fourth quarter data are released. Thus in...

This November, the rate of variable insurance fund filing was relatively slow, as is usually the case each year, but we also got the feeling that insurers are being more cautious with their investment platforms,...

There remains a near-constant flow of changes and adjustments being made to products in the variable annuity space, due to a mix of competitive and risk-based concerns, and we don’t see any let-up to this...