Stephen Richards

A forward contract is an agreement between two parties to buy or sell an asset at a specified price at a date in the future. It is typically a private arrangement used by one or both parties to manage their risk, or where one party wishes to speculate.

Two years ago I asked the question whether we needed standard tables any more.  The question arose because most life offices and even many pension schemes have enough mortality-experience data to create their own portfolio-specific models. 

How important are the labels we give to things? In a seminal paper Richard Willets brought a particular mortality phenomenon to the attention of the UK actuarial profession

The Advocate General of the European Court has recently opined that "the use of actuarial factors based on sex is incompatible with the principle of equal treatment for men and women".

In the UK the Board for Actuarial Standards (BAS) has published a series of Technical Actuarial Standards (TAS).  At the time of writing there are three standards which are either in force or shortly will be: one for data (TAS-D), one for reports (TAS-R) and one for actuarial models (TAS-M).

Earlier I described a problem in mathematical computing for mortality modelling.  This was where an intermediate step resulted in a number too big for the computer to handle, causing the entire calculation to overflow and fail. 

At it's core, the study of mortality is based on a simple ratio — the number of deaths, D, divided by the population exposed to the risk of death, E

In the debate about how fast mortality will improve in the future, sometimes it is useful to remind ourselves how far we have come. 

With the exception of dressmaking, bias is generally undesirable. This is particularly the case when projecting future mortality rates for reserving for pension liabilities. 

A good general-purpose formula for describing pensioner mortality rates is the logistic function: q = exp(α) / (1 + exp(α)) where the value of α varies by age.