Indeterminate premium life insurance

Type of nonparticipating whole life insurance that specifies both a maximum possible premium rate and a lower premium rate. The policy owner pays the lower rate for a certain period from when the policy is purchased and later the rate changes depending on the investment earnings of the insurance company. The premium rate will never be greater than the maximum premium rate. Also called flexible premium life insurance, nonguaranteed premium life insurance , and variable premium life insurance .

Index

A means of continually measuring the movement of a particular set of statistics over periods of time. Most unit trust fund managers measure their fund’s performance against that of an appropriate ‘benchmark’ index with the aim of at least matching or beating its progress. Weather derivatives are based on movements in an underlying index.

Index case

First infected person who started the outbreak of a disease (e.g., state department of health will investigate students attending a school to locate the index case of an outbreak of meningitis).

index convention

Space-saving rule used in the Index, which is the last section of the annually published Current Procedural Terminology code book. For example:KneeIncision (of)In this example, the word in parentheses (of) does not appear in the Index, but it is inferred. As another example:PancreasAnesthesia (for procedures on)In this example, because there is no such entity as pancreas anesthesia , the words in parentheses are inferred (i.e., anesthesia for procedures on the pancreas).

Index tracking

An index tracking fund aims to follow a particular index as closely as possible, not necessarily aiming to beat it. It invests only in the companies that make up that index. Index tracking removes the need to employ fund managers and so reduces charges.