Bloomberg had a long writeup on a new, not that new, investment product called significant risk transfer or SRT. At first glance, they appear to be a cousin of catastrophe bonds. Insurance companies lay off a portion of their risk to things like hurricanes or tornados through catastrophe, cat, bonds. SRTs appear to do pretty much the same thing for banks. The Bloomberg article is the first I've heard of these so if you know the comparison to cat bonds is wrong, please leave a comment.
The article cites things like car loans or loans for commercial property as examples of what is held in an SRT and "in August, Morgan Stanley offered an SRT tied to a more than $4 billion portfolio of loans to private-market funds. It priced less than 4 percentage points over the benchmark..." Loans for cars and property are no stranger to getting packaged into other vehicles so I still need to learn how SRTs differ from mortgage backed securities or asset backed securities. The example of "private market funds" is not something I've heard of being packaged and sold to investors however.
This graphic might help.
Later in the article there is a table with more info.
SRTs are probably a long way from being packaged into a retail accessible fund and it is way too early for me to have any sort of opinion on SRTs. They seem similar to cat bonds but maybe not. Like cat bonds, there will probably be opportunities to learn more about these along the way. Cat bond funds are uncorrelated return streams with pretty good yields, are not sensitive to interest rates and very little volatility. The three cat bond funds that I am aware of all reacted to hurricanes Helene and Milton but as best as I can tell there were no triggering events from those hurricanes.
Selling insurance can be very profitable with the occasional big hit. The way cat bond funds mitigate the risk is by holding a lot of very small positions insuring different types of events.
There is also a corollary to selling put options. Buying puts is a form of insurance, so selling puts (insurance) to people buying insurance is selling insurance.
There are probably more funds that sell puts, but these three each do different things. WDTE hasn't done as poorly as it appears. There was a name/symbol change and it switched to paying weekly instead of monthly. Portfoliovisualizer missed $9 worth of dividends from 2023 and the payout for this year isn't completely missing but does seem a little short. I'm not sure WDTE is a great hold but it is one where most of the dividend should be reinvested. PUTW from WisdomTree sells close to the money puts in a attempt to provide a lot of upcaputre, so there will be downcapture too, with some yield. Client holding Princeton Premium is intended to look like a horizontal line that tilts upward.
The three cat bond funds seem to fall in between PUTW and Princeton Premium in terms of return and closer to Princeton Premium in terms of volatility.
I am personally interested in learning more about various types of risk transfer. Where I think there is conceptual overlap between put selling and cat bonds, the two categories appear to be negatively correlated to each other.
WDTE and PUTW are tightly correlated to the S&P 500 but PPFIX has a negative correlation to the index. EMPIX is a personal holding that I am test driving for possible use in client accounts.
The information, analysis and opinions expressed herein reflect our judgment and opinions as of the date of writing and are subject to change at any time without notice. They are not intended to constitute legal, tax, securities or investment advice or a recommended course of action in any given situation.
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