Ugh. What a day. It’s 1:30AM as I begin to write this, and I have been going since 4AM after traveling to Manhattan to DC and back, with the usual difficulties. The two highlights of my day were meeting with the best operational management team in insurance, Assurant, and meeting up with my work colleagues for dinner to celebrate new members coming onto staff. The lowlight was not getting any time with my family.
Now, one of the nice things about my portfolio management style is that I can ignore the markets for short amounts of time, and 99% of the time, it doesn’t matter. I do 95-99% of all my trades through portfolio rebalancings and portfolio reshapings. Like Buffett, who I admire (though I don’t always agree with), I wouldn’t mind if the market were closed more frequently. So today my broad market portfolio was up 50 basis points in my absence. I am now ahead of where i was at 2/26, before the shock. Maybe I should be absent more often. 
While traveling, I put the finishing touches on six (yes) articles that will be published on RealMoney over the next month. One should be next week, and is a compilation of what I have written here on my recent portfolio reshaping, with a few bits taken out and another page of explanatory data added for greater clarity. The other five articles are a series that I have worked on for a while which I have informally entitled “The Excellent Analyst” series. It goes through the framework of questions that I ask when I have a management team all to myself. I don’t go for material nonpublic information; I also don’t go for earnings trivia, rather, I try to see how the management team thinks as businessmen. Another place where I agree with Buffett, “I am a better businessman because I am an investor, and I am a better investor because I am a businessman.”
With insurance, that comes natively to me, having done pricing, reserving, reinsurance, and corporate work as an actuary, having managed a small division of a company, with underwriting, marketing, and investment risk control. And my time managing insurance assets, mortgage bonds and then corporates, together with the derivatives. Having done all that, understanding insurance managements is second nature to me. I can sense a bad management team, and I delight in a great management team.
This brings me full circle to Assurant. Why are they the top operational insurance management team to me? This is a non-exhaustive list:
- Few other companies in insurance have seriously thought about sustainable competitive advantage. Assurant does it well, being #1 or #2 in almost all of the businesses in which they choose to compete.
- They invest in IT and customer relationships to create barriers to entry that are difficult to reverse engineer.
- Few insurance companies figure out their core competencies so closely, and then look for adjacent markets to apply them to.
- Few insurance companies look for “blue ocean” markets, where there is an unmet need and no competitors.
- Excellent capital allocators.
- Excellent at M&A, doing small infill acquisitions and growing them organically.
- Understands the concepts in market segmentation, and applies it to pricing, reserving, customer service and risk control.
- Executes almost flawlessly. What a great culture.
And if that’s not enough, they earn an ROE that is solidly in the top quartile for insurers, and I have no doubt that they will do the same next year. Progressive and AFLAC, move over. There is a new growth insurance name in town, and their valuation metrics are inexpensive, compared to what we are likely to get.
Full Disclosure: Long AIZ
I’ve been loading up on AIZ since it was in the mid 30′s. It’s nice to see someone finally taking note of this outstanding company.
We’ve owned it for clients since the IPO, and have added since. We sold a little because the position got too big. The trouble with Assurant is that it is hard to understand. Of the 15 analysts covering it, 6 are life analysts, 6 are P&C analysts, and 3 are health analysts. What’s worse is that most of their coverages are abnormal; they only do niche products, so doing competitive analyses is tough.
Rumor is that Buffett got an opportunity to buy AIZ before it went public, and he passed because it was too complex. Pity for him. Assurant would have made a great fit inside Berky. Long AIZEasy to understand—Assurant has an out standing CEO_Robert Pollock
Have you met him? He’s a friendly fellow, and bright also. His predecessor, Kerry Clayton, was also an able CEO.
But when you meet the second line management, you get impressed with Assurant again. I wish the insurance companies that I worked for did 25% as much in training future leaders. There’s a lot of bench strength there, and I’m not worried about future leadership transitions.
Long AIZ