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Tommm50

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Posts posted by Tommm50

  1. Help me, I'm confused. I've been in the insurance business a long time and the uw results for the quarter were EXCELLENT as compared to last year and in general. Yet the market knocks the price DOWN 2%. Is it possible the market is so ignorant of the key drivers of an insurance group or am I missing something important?

  2. Having once worked in one of Fairfax's companies, meeting Prem, and seeing the quality way in which the company and people were handled I'm comfortable with Prem's integrity. To me the difference maker in the two stocks going forward is Fairfax's international holdings. The nascent operations in India and Southeast Asia have huge upside potential IMHO.

  3. Regarding the Cohen dismissal, the headlines blare he wins a dismissal but the judge's ruling is "did not belong in that state's courts". There's nothing about the actual merits of the case. This seems a very curious result after 12 years. Something is quite rotten in New Jersey.

  4. Yup, that's my point. That period happened to catch the catastrophes so the accident "year" in this case is and accident 4 momths. If it's annualized you add in "normal" losses and 8 months of premium the combined should come down significantly.

  5. I hate to point this out but the notion of a "hard market" in insurance and reinsurance is a vestige of history. The statistics indicate the industry has made an underwriting profit maybe 5 times in the last 35 years. The hard market/soft market cycle was true up until Bermuda arrived and the movement of capital became easy. It used to be hard to get capital into the insurance business, individually state licensed, etc. Once Bermuda captives showed up (and then grew to the point of buying their U.S. adversaries) the dynamic changed. Billions of dollars of capital come in to the business overnight. The idea of rates moving for more than a few months is an institutional memory. What makes Fairfax a potential juggernaut (I believe they've significantly reduced their property cat exposure) is their focus on casualty business in the U.S. and their significant growth potential in India and Southeast Asia.

  6. Loss ratios reported are "incurred losses" vs earned premiums. Incurred losses are a combination of paid claims and loss reserves. Loss reserves come in two flavors. Case reserves which are established case by case by the claim department are an estimate of the ultimate value of an individual claim. IBNR (incurred but not reported) reserves are established by the actuarial department on a book of business basis. They reflect the company's experience that at any point in time for a group of polices there are claims that have occurred but have not yet been reported to the insurance company (when the are the claims department establishes case reserves and IBNR reserves diminish). Reserve deficiencies or redundancies occur over time, as a given policy year matures, the company finds out if all these estimates they've had to make are too low or too high.

  7. I own an iPhone and wouldn't even think about switching simply because all my devices are tied together and IT WORKS! That's worth a lot to me. For what ever nominal gain I might get from Android or BBY it simply wouldn't be worth the amount of effort it would take to get all my devices on the same page all the time. That's not to say that I don't think the Apple claw hold on my technology isn't concerning (and expensive) but Google is even worse in that regard. These guys simply have too much power. Creepily so.

     

    http://nypost.com/2015/03/28/google-controls-what-we-buy-the-news-we-read-and-obamas-policies/

     

     

    I use a Blackberry (used to be a Z10, just got the "classic" for the keyboard) and I feel the same way about it. The hub collects my different mails, texts, and phone calls. It's very convenient and I wouldn't want to change. I understand it's more secure as well.

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