Major Wall Street investors and mutual funds have recently begun a new trading strategy. Instead of investments in traditional businesses or commodities, many investors have traded in Life Funds, or LFs this past month. LFs are a new type of security based on bought out life insurance policies. “The funds allow traders to go one step further in their profiteering off of the working class,” said Brad Melford, an analyst for Blackwater Associates. “Instead of estimating a company’s value and chances of success to decide our options strategies, we can guess the underlying asset’s odds of survival and profit off its life insurance policy.”
The process of trading LFs was devised by Dr. James Murray, whose LF, Live or Dead (ticker $LOD) was the first of its kind to make its initial public offering on November 8th. The fund is made up of a basket of bought-out life insurance policies. Traders can then buy shares or options contracts on the underlying fund based on expected rate of return on the life insurance.
The process sounds confusing, so Margot Robbie offered to get in a bubble bath and explain it. “So basically, a Life Fund, or LF is a bunch of life insurance policies that groups, such as Live or Dead, buy from people like your grandad,” Robbie divulged, sipping champagne, “Traders take a good look at your grandad and decide he’s in shit health and likely to croak soon, so they go long on $LOD, which is to bet that its value will increase when grandad’s life insurance pays out. Another investor thinks grandad still has a few years left in him, so $LOD will lose money paying the life insurance bill, so they go short, betting against it. Got it? Good. Now fuck off.”
Critics of Life Funds, such as economist and self-described humanitarian Marcus Lamb, say “LFs are not only economically unsound, but morally repulsive. Consider the implications of an upper class that directly profits off the deaths of a working class that needs to sell its life insurance policies for retirement money. It says our society values the deaths of these people over their lives. It’s sociopathic to say the least. God, some people can be so mean. Why can’t we all just be nice to each other?” Lamb went on to make several derogatory remarks regarding the size of Dr. Murray’s reproductive organs and the resemblance his head allegedly shares with his rear end.
“Beyond my ethical misgivings are my economic concerns,” Lamb continued, “As medical technology and human life expectancy improves, the value of these LFs will continually decrease. LFs will in turn have less purchasing power to acquire new contracts, increasing demand for policies with low payoffs, decreasing the value of LFs and so on. This positive feedback loop, unless somehow continually disrupted, will eventually lead to an implosion of the LF market. The consequences of which could result in an economic recession.” Lamb concluded, “Now excuse me, I’m going to find moral redemption at the roulette table.”
Despite these critiques, $LOD is up 6.9% this week with a substantial 10-day average volume of 42.0 million. “That means it’s doing really good,” added Margot Robbie. Melford explains this as “an eagerness of investors to involve themselves in anything risky, utterly unnecessary, or predatory toward the poor and elderly! God, I hate those leeches! Needless to say, I love LFs!”
