millsman

I hope they bought some put to limit the losses. Its difficult to know exactly what's the results (damage) on the portfolio.But we already had 8 billions on CDS and a lot of cash. The stock seem not near to stop falling, and next quarter look far far away. But i have a bad feeling, on a mark to market view. We are loosing more than 1,1 billion on our equity portfolio in less than 70 days. http://www.secinfo.com/dRX7g.s4u.htm#1stPage http://www.nasdaq.com/asp/holdings.asp?symbol=GE&selected=GE&FormType=Institutional and WFC, GE are falling like rock. Wanted or not, welcome in the hard-steel-ball club. A huge portfolio drop would results in change in rating trend and limit the ability to grow in hard market.

Thanks t-bone for your analysis. You are right. But 104 uw it's too high. We are lucky than competitions are bad assets allocators because we will be dreaming for a hard market. I just dream one day this company will be at 99, with big cat, at the bottom of soft market. I really thinks Hamblin Watsa are wonderful investor, and they need a strong brand to feed them. They don't need to accept bad float with their ability. They are well positionned again, but the portfolio is less concervative, and they not really showing uw control. Imagine uw at 95 plus investment results.

Don't really know about the bond, but they remove their hedge in november just before the december bond rally. With actual quarter another 500M would be good. For stock market bottom, when you look at 13F we lost 700M on stock since december 31. (WFC-GE)Common stocks cost 3964 and value at 3816 in last quarter. Roughly, and because they took big position, they probably are at 3100 on balance sheet. Yes, i know, we will see tax return on this. Maybe 250. But i prefer gains. Remove gains on last quarter results and they lose 206M on operation side. We don't know for Q1 2009 but why i would be optimist. They can lose 50M or 100M more. Some annonce an invisible hard market, i hope we will see real improvement and soon. Without the fall in stocks markets, nobody would be talking about hard market now. And this UW performance would be hard to swallow without these hedging gains. For the currency problem , it come from Advent and probably Northbridge. We can see advent showing an incredible 268%... but 42% before currency and hurricane! Your comments on competitive edge seem the key to understand our UW performance. What's the price paid by our consumers vs competition offer would be interesting to know.

Wow what a free-fall. Unfortunately Prem seem to have missed the top in gvnt bond and the bottom of this stock market. The damage are now huge on BV. Around 230 actually? But most important it's the big uw losses, again!. This year we can be without gains to offset operating losses. Maybe portfolio losses. We will see. They need to be perfect on uw side this year. After last couple of years claiming they will shrink to keep UW below 100, it's deceptive. We write in USA and yes we must expect some IKE. They don't shrink and priced right. I had faith in their discipline to keep uw below 100. It's why i'm loosing confidence. I'm a 10 years shareholders. Long term i know they will be right on investments side , but they need excellent UW to be alive long term.