Designing minimum guaranteed return funds

In recent years there has been a significant growth of investment products aimed at attracting investors who are worried about the downside potential of the financial markets. This paper introduces a dynamic stochastic optimization model for the design of such products. The pricing of minimum guarantees as well as the valuation of a portfolio of bonds based on a three-factor term structure model are described in detail. This allows us to accurately price individual bonds, including the zero-coupon bonds used to provide risk management, rather than having to rely on a generalized bond index model.