www.markelcorp.com
It's a publicly traded company. All the information will be right there. Knock yourself out.
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Is he willing to publicly say that his business is a guessing game and that he does not have a handle on it? Is that what you heard him say?
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That's not what I heard him say at all. What I did hear him say is that most insurance companies look at underwriting result on a quartly basis and do their planning on that basis. Because IBNR is such a huge percentage of that result (a minimum of 10%), it skews their results in the long term and makes things that are not actually profitable look like good ideas on the short run. Markel takes a very long-term approach on their books of business and doesn't jump in and out of things. They plan on a 3, 5 and 10 year cycle since it takes 10 years for most IBNR to be realized.
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Are you suggesting IBNR was the root of the problem? I am betting, and I can do the research specific to these companies, it was related to actual losses, underwriting, and investment results.
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what assumption have I made that is way out of my depth?
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The fact that you don't realize that IBNR is directly related to actual losses basically proves my point. It stands - again - for losses Incurred But Not Reported. They are losses that the company is ASSUMING are out there. It's a plain old guess. It cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be anything but a guess since it's, by definition, an unknown. I have no idea what you mean by "underwriting" unless it's the cost of underwriting, in which case you might as well throw in claims handling expense, too, since that's going to be a bigger line item anyway. Maybe you're talking about poor underwriting decisions, which again proves my point that you don't know what you're talking about since we're talking about losses and those poor underwriting decisions are going to be directly related to those losses.
And poor investment returns rarely take down insurance companies.
Ace, I don't have to assume that you're not qualified to have this kind of discussion, nor do I need to know your background. It's glaringly obvious that you don't know the first thing about how to read an insurance company's balance sheet since you are very obviously unfamiliar with the terms used on those sheets.