Thought Pieces

Here are some pieces of research and other documents that we hope visitors to our website will find interesting. Please also see our blog.

Pensions

A (UK) Pensions Data Format Standard – let’s make it happen! (Part 2)

The valuation food chain for DB pension plans. (This explains the thinking behind the development of our Pensions Concerto product).

Some of the published papers contributed to by David Wilkie and Patrick Lee

Yet more on a stochastic economic model: Part 4: a model for share earnings, dividends, and prices (ADWilkie and Sule Sahin, June 2017, Annals of Actuarial Science)

Yet more on a stochastic economic model: Part 3C: stochastic bridging for share yields and dividends and interest rates (ADWilkie and Sule Sahin, March 2017, Annals of Actuarial Science, Vol 11 Issue 1)

Yet more on a stochastic economic model: Part 3B: stochastic bridging for retail prices and wages (ADWilkie and Sule Sahin, March 2017, Annals of Actuarial Science, Vol 11 Issue 1)

Yet more on a stochastic economic model: Part 3A: stochastic interpolation: Brownian and Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (OU) bridges (ADWilkie and Sule Sahin, March 2017, Annals of Actuarial Science, Vol 11 Issue 1)

Yet more on a stochastic economic model: part 2: initial conditions, select periods and neutralising parameters (ADWilkie and Sule Sahin, March 2016, Annals of Actuarial Science, Vol 10 Issue 1)

Yet More on a Stochastic Economic Model: Part 1: Updating and Refitting, 1995 to 2009 (ADWilkie, Sule Sahin, AJGCairns and Torsten Kleinow, March 2011, Annals of Actuarial Science, Vol 5 Issue 1)

A General Framework for Stochastic Mortality and Investment Risks (PJLee, 20Mar2000, WilkieFest)

A Comparison of Asset Models (ADWilkie and PJLee, AFIR 2000)

Maximising LongTerm Return (PJLee, AFIR 1994)

Portfolio Selection In The Presence Of Options(PJLee, AFIR 1993)

Just How Risky Are Equities Over The Long Term? (PJLee, SIAS 1991)

Blog posts by Patrick Lee

A (UK) Pensions Data Format Standard – let’s make it happen! (Part 2)

Moving pensions and insurance towards Web 3.0

Useful charts for business/data analysis in Excel 2016

Migrating to the cloud (Microsoft Azure and Office 365)

WebPocketMoney: an easy way to track your children’s pocket money balances online, with a natural “Tell me” user interface

Building a corporate dashboard so that you have key management information at a glance

How corporate pension liabilities could vary by 10% or more, even on an agreed set of assumptions

VBA Course

Here we provide, for those interested in learning or improving their VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) programming, on an “AS IS” basis with no warranties or rights, a course we developed in 2003, but which remains largely valid (since Microsoft has made few changes to VBA since then).InQA Two day VBA Course parts 1 to 5 (zip file, 2MB).

InQA Two day VBA Course parts 6 to 10 (zip file, 1MB).

Note: we write our production code mainly in C# and other Microsoft .NET languages, but we still use VBA for some purposes including for some aspects of testing and for developing quick prototypes.

The course includes the following sections:

• why you should use VBA as opposed to pure Excel
• how to structure your VBA applications
• VBA fundamentals (the basics that every VBA programmer needs to know – plus a few extras)
• Visual Beartraps : top 10 VB/VBA “gotchas” or pitfalls for the unwary
• How to read and write from different sources: Excel, text files, Access, Word
• Debugging: how to find and squash those bugs quickly
• How to produce management reports in Excel/Access/Word
• How to make your code as reusable as possible
• Pushing the envelope with VBA
• Going Global: introduction to object oriented design, class modules and COM.