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Thanks @Viking! As always, your posts are full of thought provoking observations and questions. The section highlighted above from the end of your post struck a chord with me. As a retired actuary who spent 33 years with the same P and C company, who also admired and personally invested in Berkshire, Markel, Fairfax and (before Berkshire acquired it), Alleghany, I spent a good portion of my own time trying to get the company I worked for to copy the business model of these other companies, with no success. Your points about why more competitors don’t copy them are pretty much the same as I eventually concluded. Exponential compounding connected with long term focused investing in equities really begins to pay off once it’s had a long runway to work its inexorable magic. Ten years, which is a long time for a typical CEO just isn’t long enough for the associated risk to pay off. Family run companies like Berkshire, Fairfax, Markel, are able to take the long view and see how powerful a few extra points of returns, albeit lumpy, can pay off once the timeframe approaches and even exceeds 30 years. Charlie Munger was once asked why more companies didn’t follow Berkshire’s approach of focused investing in a few companies. He responded with “It’s a good question. More companies should follow us. Look at our results and the fun we’re having. But Jack McDonald, the Stanford Business professor who teaches a course based on these value investment principles, says he feels like the Maytag repairman.” I used this same question and answer in a white paper I shared with a new CEO and CFO at the company I worked for. The CEO responded with a short email basically saying it was interesting, but attributing Berkshire’s success only to great stock picking. I got a brief audience with the CFO, during which I learned that the company I worked for had decided to outsource the investment function altogether to a company focused on index ETFs for both equities and fixed income. That’s when I gave up trying to advocate for a more intelligent and successful business model from the inside of a company, and now in retirement, I vote with my own assets and invest them only in companies like Fairfax that have a proven track record of managing float, investments and insurance underwriting in an intelligent fashion. I’ve seen how hard it is to get competitors to change to a similar approach, and am convinced that this holistic long term view of a successful insurance business model is a true moat in and of itself. Analysts like Brett Horn who don’t think Fairfax has a moat miss exactly what you outlined in your post — the proof in the pudding of a hugely successful long term compounder, one which still has a good amount of runway left ahead of it.