I've asked two financial advisors about CAT bonds. One had never heard of them and the other said were about as risky as crypto. I guess this is such a niche product that there isn't widespread knowledge about it. I wonder how much more diversified $ILS could be if it were larger. Would a 10x increase in assets under management give it significantly less volatility because it could do a better job spreading risk arou…
The lack of information was my inspiration for building Riskvest. I called my own broker and when I said catastrophic bonds they asked if I meant buying bonds already in default. On the risk side - your comments here are part of the myth I’m trying to dispel and will have lots more to say in future posts. Yes for a single CAT bond you are exposed to potential 100% principle losses. But if you buy a bundle of CAT bond…
A “2% risk of default” on an individual bond is something a retail investor might be able to understand, but no one should be buying a “diversified” bundle of these things if they cannot form a reasonable understanding of how correlated they are. Why should understanding the correlation risk be left up to individual investors building their own portfolios?
I also think forming an intuition for these more “all-or-nothing” type events is more difficult than e.g. understanding that if GOOG goes down 10% then AAPL might do too at the same time because they are both tech stocks.