Phoenix01

We all owe Andy Benard a massive amount of gratitude for his leadership in turning around the FFH insurance subs.

Prem kept the insurance companies independent of each other prior to 2011. When they were placed under a single leadership umbrella, they shared best practices and there was a huge improvement. Each company remains independent, but accountable to the single leadership team.

He is an analyst for RBC that covers Fairfax. He has been fairly conservative with his valuations in the past.

Looks like Mark Dwell has seen it

Part #2

Here is a good review of the MW report. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nsxGizwLTd8&si=KJEEabBKv7v5b70z

That is a great way to keep the substantial upside of FFH and protect against the temporary market fluctuations. Are there any insurance companies that are better candidates to go short?

Share Message - Sam Altman: Ousted OpenAI boss to return days after being sacked https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67494165

It can also be risk mitigation. A major disaster could cost FFH double since its price would likely drop as well and they would get hit with the TRS payment during the major event.

There are 3 keys factors to developing AI: Talent, Compute and Data. There has been lots of discussion about the talent that OpenAI has thrown away, and lots of discussion about the chips that are required to allow the progress to continue. However, there is very little discussion about the Datasets required to train the AI. There are big opportunities in this space and this is a bottleneck to commercialize the AI models. You might want to take a look at Shutterstock (SSTK) who has an interesting business model to leverage their huge high quality picture, video, audio, 3D collection for AI training. The OpenAI team has a long term relationship with SSTK to supply access to there collection to train and maintain their models. Google, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia,... have also signed up for access to the SSTK collection.

Looks like OPEC+ will cut supply if the Iran deal gets ratified. The price of crude is reacting to the announcement and is up over $3 today.

Viking- Thanks for sharing. It looks like the Iran deal will allow OPEC+ to increase their output quickly. Should find out more later this week. The release of the US’s strategic petroleum reserves at about 1 million bpd ends in mid-October; Iran’s 100 million barrels of stored crude and condensate could effectively replace that for three months. By next year, 1-1.2 million bpd of Iranian supply would return to the market.

Thanks SD for generously sharing your wisdom. Protecting the downside by taking $ off the table in times of doubt or once personal objectives are meet is very sound advice. Make me think of Buffet's rules: 1) Don't lose money. 2) Don't forget rule #1. These are the dangers of trying to capture all the Alpha. Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. Similar to Prem's warnings about reaching for yield.

With all the volatility in the energy sector, how would you recommend hedging against sudden market sell offs? Does buying short duration puts options on long positions make sense? Are there better strategies?