Insurance companies can leverage the regulatory requirement of a "Risk Management Own Risk and Solvency Assessment" (RMORSA) to improve risk-to-reward decision-making in general, and business planning in particular. This paper profiles several RMORSA-based improvements and explains how those...

This paper analyzes select lessons from the recently published book by Howard Marks, "The Most Important Thing" (NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), from a private equity perspective. Mr. Marks specializes in credit value investments, and as a result private equity investors may overlook the...

Many insurers have undertaken efficiency initiatives for various corporate functions over the years, including rules-based claims systems to control "claims leakage," finance transformation, IT and business process outsourcing, and others. Given the current challenging insurance market (e.g.,...

This paper proposes a definition and assessment methodology for systemic financial risk that was inspired by systems accident research. Sociologist Charles Perrow found that industrial, aviation and marine systems are prone to failure if those systems are interactively complex and tightly...

The field of Security Analysis has generally come to embrace the theories of modern economics, seemingly without adequate consideration for how to bridge the gap between theory and practice. The consequences of this, most recently experienced in the 2007-2008 financial crisis, have been...

Books on Graham and Dodd-based valuation tend to be predominantly introductory in nature, and essentially present different interpretations of value investing, broadly defined. This book takes a different approach; rather than introduce a new variation on the value investing theme, it adopts the...

Purpose: This paper illustrates the viability of distressed M&A by way of case study utilizing the modern Graham and Dodd valuation approach.Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents a distressed acquisition case study of the 1996 Marvel Entertainment Group (Marvel) bankruptcy. It draws on...

As I write this, markets across the globe are in turmoil and economies are slowing due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout the early phases of the turmoil, we heard explanatory narratives beginning to form such as, “This came out of nowhere! No-one saw this coming.” The irony is that...

This paper provides an overview of the concept of super catastrophes, or Super Cats, as alternative investment opportunities. By way of the recent Pepsi Play For a Billion sweepstakes case we previously published a methodology for valuing Super Cats with a reasonable margin of safety. This...

Insurance claims can take years to resolve, which makes insurance performance measurement - and incentive compensation based on such measurement - challenging. The insurance industry utilizes a method of analysis called accident year analysis to manage the temporal challenge inherent in...