Opinion

This month's edition of Trading Risk has involved a fair bit of bean counting to try to sum up the year ahead for the ILS market.

Earlier this week, after breaking the news that Montpelier Re was making overtures to potential bidders, The Insurance Insider editor Mark Geoghegan tweeted that one of our bird-watching colleagues should keep his binoculars handy as it seemed it was "mating season" in Bermuda.

Do other industries talk about pie as much as the reinsurance sector?

The alternative reinsurance market now looks like it has come full circle as one of the industry's longest-standing fund managers looks to set up a rated equity-funded vehicle

One of the questions the reinsurance market has been grappling with over the past year is how to make a "strategic sidecar" work

While most people in the northern hemisphere are on alert for barbecue weather this summer, reinsurance executives will be on a different type of weather watch - closely tracking tropical storm updates for potential threats to their portfolios

The reinsurance market has been asking itself the dreaded "are we there yet" question for quite some time now as it waits to see when rates will stabilise.

Reinsurance underwriters place a high value on building up strong relationships with brokers and counterparties, so it's no surprise that talk about the direction of the current market tends to sound like someone reeling from a painful break-up.

Earlier this year we covered a speech from Scor CEO Denis Kessler, in which he suggested that the ILS market had been fuelled by ultra-low interest rates - and that the end of quantitative easing in the US would lessen the sector's appeal.

It's maybe a bit ironic for the editor of a convergence magazine to be sceptical of the impact that new capital vehicles will have on the market.

One of the perks of working for Insider Publishing is that the events we put on make for some great copy.

All the kerfuffle at last year's Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous about allegedly naive capital and declining cat bond premiums seems quite ironic now that the January renewals are behind us.