Evaluating risk in a life settlement fund
As with a lot of alternative investment funds, it is often difficult for outside investors to evaluate all the risks, and a life settlement fund is no exception. Whilst certain risks such as the policy origination process, external service providers or extended longevity are common to both open-ended and close-ended funds, the former is subject to greater market risks and thus the fund structure and liquidity are also important elements to consider

Valuation of micro longevity products
As an increasing amount of institutional capital enters this asset class, more rigour and thought are being put into how life settlements should be valued. The majority of participants in this market value their assets on a mark-to-model basis. The two approaches that are commonly used today are deterministic and probabilistic. The article analyses both valuation techniques and its implications in an open-ended life settlement fund.

Introduction to synthetic micro-longevity instruments
The risk within a longevity investment can be segregated into two types- micro-longevity risk and macro-longevity risk. Micro-longevity risk typically refers to a small pool of demographically wealthy lives - between 200 and 1,000 individuals - that have been medically underwritten on an individual basis, whereas macro-longevity risk references a much larger pool of lives, in the range of tens of thousands, where no underwriting has been performed. This article explores micro-longevity instruments available to investors, such as longevity-linked indices, longevity-linked notes and longevity-linked swaps.

Taxation of Life Settlements
The publication of the Internal Revenue Services' rulings 2009-13 and 2009-14 in May brought to the forefront a tax issue that many professional investors and asset managers have known about for years, and have either chosen to ignore or have spent much time and energy implementing various tax structures to help mitigate against. At Centurion, we recognised in 2002 the tax issues in investing in life settlements.

Longevity as an asset class
Longevity as an asset class has been in existence for a very long time. For years, pension providers and insurance companies have been exposed to and have had to manage and deal with this risk. As transactions have typically been extremely large, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, historically they have been inaccessible to most investors in the capital market. However, in the last few years, we have seen a sea change as more investment banks are entering into this arena, which in turn is making this asset class increasingly more accessible to investors. Typical institutions exposed to this risk are annuity providers, defined benefit pension plan providers and life settlement funds. This article explains longevity as an asset class.

Analysing liquidity in life settlement funds
Prudent liquidity management is vital in the viability and success of any investment fund. In an asset such as life settlements which is often characterised by many as an illiquid class, the challenge is not only to understand how to manage liquidity but also to generate it.