CIA

I'm currently reading Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. You know you are around actuaries when they go "WTF why would you want to read about that?! Get a life!"

It's, um, the other CIA people. The one with spies instead of actuaries?

Anyways it's a pretty interesting book. It really shows how incompetent the CIA is.

Financial statements are useless!!!

Financial statements are suppose to be measuring the health of a company at a point in time. For an insurance company, this is difficult because of a funky liability called reserves. While it is based on sound mathematical and statistical principles, there is a certain level of subjectivity involved; that's why I have a job :).

Some might criticize the insurance business for this; even going as far as to say financial statements of life insurers are useless because all sorts of stuff can be "hidden" in the reserves. All they show is a stream of smoothed earnings.

When the market is doing well and the insurer doesn't realize gains by releasing capital or reserves, he's being prudent. When the market is down and the lose is being cushioned by releasing reserves, the insurer is making stuff up. Leave it to the actuary to have a long term outlook! I'm reminded of a CIA ad that compares actuaries to other professionals like stock brokers and investment analysts. See page 10 of this issue's Beyond Risk (PDF).

DP-IC Exam: Done.

It's finally over but I feel so pwned. I'll try my best not to think about it. In general it wasn't really what I was expecting. I thought the exam had a lot more calculations than the last year's exam and that just threw me off totally. During reading time I was going double-you-tee-eff at all the tables of numbers. Another thing that I wasn't expecting to be tight is time. I wasn't totally out of time but it was for sure tighter than I thought it would be.

Time for a short break and then off I go to the FSA modules!

PASS ME SOA!!!!!