Particularly in recent weeks, Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") has been extremely busy helping a client implement a custom financial application that is quite complex and truly a modern distributed system. The data, tools, work rules and analytics embedded within this new application are certainly cutting-edge and should help this client further extend their leadership in their particular sector of the financial markets. What is more, this new system should allow this client to truly take their business to the next level on a real-time basis with true Enterprise Risk Management.

TCM primarily assisted this client with some custom analytic code written in the MATLAB technical programming language that takes advantage of that specialized language's strengths with arrays and mathematical calculations as well as a quite powerful set of graphical user interface ("GUI") tools. Like the original Collateralized Mortgage Obligation ("CMO") code that Lars and Aldon wrote at Lehman Brothers more than twenty years ago, this new analytic code allows for the real-time pricing and sensitivity analysis of a relatively new type of cash flow that ultimately will be securitized should the securitization markets revive. The input variations to the analytic model are almost infinite and allow for the effective pricing of many variations of life insurance policies.

One of the noted strengths of the Toomre Capital Markets LLC team is helping our clients connect the hidden dots of financial information, risk management and structured finance modeling. We are especially good at uncovering and honing in on that crucial information or aspect of a financial model that is a key to value / risk determination. If the reader's organization needs some assistance in this area, with their financial models or specifically with detailed MATLAB financial modeling, please feel to contact us so that we might discuss your issues further. As the above client notes, TCM is particularly adept of dealing with those complex financial problems with lots of "hair balls."

The Sunday January 11th 2008 edition of The New York Post included an article entitled Antique & Gem Dealers Get Hock Of A Deal. This article has some details about how the victims of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scandal are selling off their antiques, fine art and jewels in order to raise cash from their high-end collections. "You've got these people who lost all of their investments, but have Rembrandt, Matisse, Van Gogh and Picasso on their walls," said a source close to several victims. Kofski Antiques, a shop in Palm Beach, Fla., has received items from several Madoff victims, said owner Chris Hill, including a 75-year-old who told him, "I was worth in excess of $100 million, and, son, I don't think I could buy you lunch today."

Apparently Mr. Hill also recently put an advertisement in a local paper asking, "Have you been affected by Bernard Madoff, a downturn in the economy, a reversal of income? You may want to contact Kofski." Another ad also openly asks "Madoff victims" if they want to sell their life insurance.

This last line of the article caught the attention of Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM"). In the year plus since it was first posted, the TCM post Appeal of Insurance-Linked Securities and Life Settlements has been quite popular with those looking for further information on this relatively novel sector of the collateralized debt markets. Some have been interested in how these type of investments have had limited correlation with other types of debt and collateralized structured products. Others have been interested in how they might realize more than surrender value from the disposal of an often forgotten asset such as a whole life insurance policy.

As some readers are aware, Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") is one of the few Capital Markets consultancies with considerable experience in one arcane sector of the securitization markets called insurance-linked securities. Lars Toomre was originally retained in 1997 by what is now known as Munich Re America, Inc. to help that subsidiary of Munich Re thrash out what strategies to pursue in the convergence of the capital markets and more traditional insurance markets driven by fortuitous loss. Partly as a result of that initial strategy work, American Re Financial Products was established to pursue three major initiatives:

• Finite reinsurance (now much discredited after the abuses exposed by the AIG/General Re finite reinsurance abuse scandal)
• Reinsurance of credit enhancement mono-line insurance companies and other credit enhancement opportunities primarily originating from world-wide project finance needs (now shut down due to Munich Re's downgrade from AAA to A in 2001), and
• Creation of American Re Capital Markets to create, underwrite and trade in various insurance-related opportunities such as future film production securitizations, weather derivatives, insurance-linked securities, guarantees of index total rates of return, insurance swaps, the hedging of Enterprise Risk Management exposures and the secondary trading of various property and casualty, health and life insurance policies (now part of Munich Re Capital Markets operation in New York City).

Lars Toomre ended up joining Munich Re to help establish American Re Capital Markets where he focused on weather derivatives, enterprise risk management and other odd-ball initiatives with "hair on them". One of the odd-ball type of requests that periodically would come across the Capital Markets desk concerned "What would Munich Re want to pay for a particular insurance policy (or sometimes portfolio of insurance policies) in the secondary market?" Some of these requests concerned structured settlements, some concerned viatical insurance and some were marketed as "life settlements". Generally, the insurance broker was looking for a better price than what the leading aggregators of the day (generally JG Wentworth or General Re Financial Products) were willing to pay. The type of policy and details within caused the valuations from various sources to often vary considerably.

Some people have asked why bother with all the complications of acquiring a portfolio of life insurance policies in the secondary market or a diversified portfolio of P&C risks? In short, the answer is that the returns from such diversified portfolios do not correlate with the returns from more traditional investment sectors such as equity, fixed-income, currencies or commodities. Hence, some of the smartest diversified investment companies (like Berkshire Hathaway, PIMCO, Citadel Investments and Greenlight Capital) have made some very significant allocations to insurance, insurance derivatives and insurance-linked securities, particularly because of how this sector risk increases their risk-adjusted returns (as calculated by such measures as the Sharpe Ratio).

On Monday, November 26th 2007, The Wall Street Journal published a front-page article entitled An Insurance Man Builds A Lively Business in Death written by Liam Pleven and Rachel Emma Silverman. This article describes in quite some detail how life settlement contracts are acquired and some of the pratfalls of dealing with retail clientele that have primary life insurers and regulators warily circling this rapidly expanding industry.