The lecture considers the subject of arbitration as a means of determining otherwise irreconcilable disputes. Although arbitration may be required over a wide range of subjects, the lecturer's considerable experience has been in the area of construction. He outlines how arbitration was carried out in the 1950s and the relationship between arbitrators and arbitrations and the courts. Since that time there have been radical changes to improve the system, and these are described, particularly the various Acts of Parliament relevant to the subject. The lecturer concludes that currently construction arbitration is in good heart, but that too much paper is still being generated.

The procedure for estimating probable maximum loss (PML) for natural catastrophes has evolved over the past few decades from a rather simplistic deterministic basis to a more sophisticated methodology based on loss exceedance probability curves, generated using catastrophe modelling software. This development process is reviewed, with an emphasis on the earthquake peril, which, because of its widespread threat to critical industrial installations, has been at the forefront of most PML advances. The coherent risk definition of PML is advocated as an improvement over standard quantile methods, which can give rise to anomalous aggregation results failing to satisfy the fundamental axiom of subadditivity, and so discouraging the pooling of risks.

During 2001, which was the fifteenth year of publication of the FTSE All-World Index series – previously known as the Financial Times-Actuaries World Index, and the FT/S&P Actuaries World Index – the major change was the implementation of long promised adjustments to reflect the available free floats of each constituent company's shares on 18 June 2001.