1. The assessment of industrial ordinary shares has not yet been discussed by the Institute. This is surprising, both in view of the fact that British insurance companies hold ordinary shares to a value approaching £1000 million and also because actuaries are playing an increasing part in the investment world. The Institute is indeed the only professional body which examines candidates for membership in investment knowledge. Hitherto the examinations have been concerned mainly with general principles, but the widening of the scope of the syllabus since the war makes it necessary that the methods by which industrial shares are assessed should be discussed. It is the purpose of this paper to provide an opportunity for such a discussion.

In the course of preparing a paper dealing with statistics relating to fire insurance (Beard, 1957) the need arose to find numerical values of the confluent hypergeometric function for parameter values well outside any tabulated range, and this note is concerned with various approximations investigated in the course of these experiments.