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Showing content with the highest reputation on 05/04/2026 in Posts

  1. I'm not sure I agree with your first statement. Fairfax has done incredibly well since I invested in late '22, as insurance market strengthened bigtime and they have a ton of leverage to increasing rates given duration and size of bond portfolio. On top, their equity portfolio started doing much better, so all engines started firing just around the same time. On top, you had a very low price, so you got multiple expansion on top. That's a great investment! But it's not like Fairfax did anything particularly clever in my opinion. They just didn't do anything extremely dumb (reach for duration during ZIRP), and a lot of factors (largely outside of their control) fell in place. They weren't as dumb as they looked prior to '22, nor were they as smart as some make them out to me based on the period since. Most insurance companies have absolutely minted in recent years. I don't think it's Fairfax' investments that have been the main driver of returns, nor do I think it will be going forward. Given their size, I wouldn't expect any market-beating equity outperformance. We had a long stretch of underperformance prier to their recent hot streak, and as their capital base grows, outperformance will only get harder to come buy. If you compare Fairfax to well-run insurers like WRB and Beazley, which mostly holds T-bills as well, Fairfax is even struggling a bit to keep up. WRB gets a higher multiple, I suppose partly due to simplicity (which I think is fair, and I wouldn't expect it to change). I know I'm kicking a hornets' nest here, but I do think it's a bit of an echo chamber around Fairfax (and I guess that's no surprise given the name of the forum...). I recommend it to people who wants a low-maintenance, long-term holding, given quality of people/no agency risk. But I still think there are better insurance names around from a risk-reward perspective. It's not just whether Fairfax looks like a sound investment here. To me It's about opportunity cost. On a more tactical level (booo!), a lot of investors seem to have forgotten that insurance (and insurance brokering) is cyclical. And people hate when/if earnings start coming down/flatline.
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