Last month, amid reports that Hurricane Beryl would become the earliest Category 5 hurricane in history, a group of money managers were busy trying to figure out whether their highly calibrated bets centered on natural catastrophes were about to take a major hit.
Beryl ended up tearing through the Windward Islands and Mexico, before making landfall near Houston and then moving up through Texas to Canada. So far, it’s caused as much as $3.3 billion in insured losses in the US, Caribbean and Mexico, according to an estimate by Karen Clark & Co., a catastrophe modeler. But holders of catastrophe bonds — from which investors are currently reaping close to a 14% annualized return — wo