On Wednesday morning @The Insurer held its annual Pre Monte Carlo Forum. Half a dozen reinsurance-sector heavyweights made brief keynotes in the Willis auditorium, then were grilled in a panel discussion moderated by the ebullient @Sophie Roberts from @The Insurer TV.

The event is an invaluable bellwether. As summer wanes and all minds turn to reinsurance renewals, it and others provide an early indicator of the treaty market’s starting position in its fiendishly oscillating cycle of fiscal feast and famine, where it’s been trapped since unintermediated reinsurance relationships were rightly expunged decades ago.

During the audience Q&A, one wag offered the observation that the spirit of the discussion he’d just heard was almost identical to a panel held at the LIRMA Annual Forum in 1995. (LIRMA was the predecessor body to the London company market’s International Underwriting Association.) 30 years on, panellists were still talking about the relevance of the reinsurance market and its existential need to focus more on products that do what customers need. Both panels desired eradication of price cyclicality to enter a new world of stable, risk-based pricing.

The day before this déjà vu event, the annual London ILS conference held by @Artemis presented a similar panel of luminaries to discuss the impending renewal season. Speaker @Luca Albertini, CEO of @Leadenhall Capital Markets, one of London’s original ILS funds, said that investors believe risk transfer instruments are priced on the risk, and nothing much else. “We are expected to price based on expected risk, right? Not what happened last week or last month, but is what is the expected risk?” he asked hypothetically (as @Steve Evans reported).

The continued existence of the cycle – which no one seems to think has been eradicated – reveals more than a hint of sarcasm in Albertini’s comment. And cycle cynicism isn’t misplaced. It survived the ‘technical pricing’ revolution of the 1990s, because it was not possible then to price correctly based on expected risk, even with the best will in the world. The necessary technology, analytics, and data simply didn’t yet exist.

That was then. Thirty years have passed, and we have more than enough information and computing power to support any effort to arrive at a risk-based price for almost any reinsurance risk (even if not the elusive ‘right price’). Yet as London dons its away-strip and decamps to Monte Carlo, all the evidence suggests that the cycle persists, and an overcorrection is just a year or two away.

That’s plenty of time to adopt and embrace some cycle-busting tech!