Betting on death and destruction.

[Magda Hassan]

So now they can bet on death. And pretty much death of their own making since they also own and run the companies that are the global polluters and are responsible for the man made climate changes. I think they calls this a win- win strategy. Except we lose-lose.

How To Hedge A Hurricane

Worried about hurricane season? The market can help.
Weather futures specifically tied to Atlantic hurricanes are set to begin trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as soon as the first storm gets brewing. The National Weather Center's hurricane forecasters predict 13 to 17 named storms this year, three to five of them potentially major hurricanes, defined as Category 3 and above on the scale used to measure the storms.
Hurricane futures, which were introduced on the Merc in March, will allow energy traders to hedge risks in their positions and allow speculators to bet on the potential impact Atlantic storms will have. Eventually, reinsurers might be attracted to them as another way to offset risks in their portfolios.
It is another piece of a blossoming derivatives market for storm risks. Last year, insurance brokers underwrote $5 billion in catastrophe-risk bonds, and so far this year, another $2 billion have been underwritten, according to Swiss Reinsurance.
"We are certainly on a record pace," said Judy Klugman, managing director of insurance-linked securities at Swiss Re Capital Markets, the broker division of Swiss Re.
Weather futures are certainly nothing new, but they have attracted much more interest in the last year as hedge funds and other traders look for new places to invest. CME already lists contracts based on temperatures for 35 cities around the world, as well as snowfall and frost contracts.
Last year, the notional value of weather contracts traded on CME was $22 billion, with 800,000 contracts traded. This year is on pace to break 1 million contracts.
The disastrous 2004 and 2005 Atlantic hurricane seasons, which resulted in losses over $75 billion to the insurance and reinsurance industry, forced underwriters to find other ways to offset risks, giving rise to the popularity of catastrophe bonds and private "side car" agreements, many of them with hedge funds looking to diversify their holdings.
Hurricane futures may be the next iteration of this growing derivatives market. "With these hurricane contracts, insurers and others will be able to transfer their risk to the capital markets and increase their capacity to insure customers," said Felix Carabello, CME's director of Alternative Investment Products.
For now, however, the contracts seem more geared to energy traders and speculators.
The CME contracts are based on an index developed by Carvill, a firm that traces and calculates hurricane activity. It takes the standard Saffir-Simpson Scale of hurricane strength and beefs it up, adding the geographic size, or radius, of the storm to its wind velocity and other factors.
Say an Atlantic tropical storm forms, strong enough to be named, and appears headed for landfall. The corresponding CME hurricane futures contract will begin trading, at $1,000 per point on the Carvill index. (CME will have three contracts lined up at any one time, with numbers corresponding to the named storms.)
Suppose the storm starts out at medium strength and many think it's going to strengthen before it makes landfall. A trader who pays $2,000 for a futures contract on a size 2 storm stands to profit $2,000 if the storm makes landfall as a size 4 storm on the scale, or lose the cost of the contract if the storm peters out.
In the same vein, a trader who doubts the storm will keep its strength could sell (or short) the futures contract on a size 2 storm and profit $1,000 if it makes landfall as a size 1 storm.
In a real-life scenario, an energy trader who is long in his natural gas positions but thinks the storm won't be as bad as predicted at landfall could short hurricane futures to hedge his natural gas position. The gains from shorting the hurricane futures would offset the losses from his natural gas positions.


CME isn't the only exchange to offer weather trading. WeatherBill.com out of San Francisco allows traders to buy and sell weather contracts online.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/25/weather...ather.html