One Bond Market Is Defying the Global Selloff With Record Returns

-- As bond markets everywhere get battered by a cocktail of higher interest rates, deficit angst and hawkish central bankers, one class of debt instrument is handing creditors double-digit returns: catastrophe bonds.Investors in the $40 billion market for so-called cat bonds have literally been sitting out the storm to reap returns as high as 16% this year.

Asset managers, meanwhile, are lining up to get access to outsize returns. They also like the portfolio diversification that cat bonds offer, because the instruments don’t correlate with equities or other fixed-income markets. Schroders AG and GAM Investments of Switzerland run the biggest cat bond funds, according to Morningstar Inc. Credit Suisse, Amundi Asset Management and Axa Investment Managers are also active in the market.

“There’s been a repricing of catastrophe risk around the globe, especially in places like California, Florida and Australia,” said Steve Evans, owner of Artemis, a firm that tracks the cat bond and insurance-linked securities market. “The return potential has roughly doubled in the last decade.”A reinsurer or company issues a bond when it wants to spread the risk of a particular disaster to capital market participants.

Overall, rising inflation, higher currency-related costs and the impact of Ian “caused a significant repricing of risk,” Schultz said.This year, cat bond investors have mostly been spared major trigger events. Analysts at Citigroup Inc. estimate total insured losses in the third quarter reached about $17 billion, which is less than normal “for this active period,” according to a recent client note.

Mara Dobrescu, director of fixed-income strategies at Morningstar Inc., said investors are “simply betting those mathematical models are well calibrated and correct.”

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