Well, whaddaya know?? I received a nice mention at The Ideas Report For Serious Investors. Unexpected, and an honor. I really like their blog and have added it to my RSS reader.? So, I left them this comment, which is not published yet:
Hey, thanks for mentioning me. Here’s a bonus for those with access to RealMoney:
- Time to Get Personal With Insurers
- Parsing the Financials of the Financials
- Buyers Beware: Financials are Different
- Don’t Bet Your Life on the Insurance Sector
- Playing the Cycles in the Insurance Sector
And away from RealMoney:
- How Wall Street Looks at Insurance Companies
- An Amazing Ten Years for Insurance Stocks
- Investing in Financial Stocks is Tough
- Don?t Overpay, for Insurance M&A
- Assurant and Intelligent Acquistions
- Quantitative Analysis is not Trivial ? The Case of PB-ROE
- How Do You Value an Insurance Business?
- Why Financial Stocks Are Harder to Analyze
I hope you enjoy these. They are the bulk of my thoughts on insurance stocks, aside from issue-specific commentary.
David
Disclosure: long ALL NWLI SAFT RGA AIZ PRE CB
I went back through all of my blog posts in insurance to analyze what were the best things I had written on insurance investing.? I also added one more blog post idea to my list.? A long time ago, I wrote a 16-page paper summarizing the whole insurance industry for a former employer.? It was urgent, so I pulled an all-nighter at the ripe old age of 43.? He was deeply grateful for the piece, and then it never got published.? It was supposed to span three issues of his newsletter, but it never appeared in one.? I have no idea why it never ran, but it bugged me that it never did.? So, with a little updating, I hope to release it in serial form sometime in the next few months.? I have lost the original file, so I will have to scan it in and edit it.
But enough of that — the articles listed above are a reasonable summary of how I analyze insurance and other financial stocks.? For those that invest in stocks, I hope you enjoy these posts.
Postscript — Apologies to PlanMaestro, Manual of Ideas republished his work, and I appreciate the two mentions from him at his blog, Variant Perceptions.? He expands his thoughts on my most recent piece on AIG’s under-reserving.? Keep it up PlanMaestro, and remember, PartnerRe does not discount its reserves.
What do you think of the Australian insurer QBE? They have a good track record of growing by acquisition.
I have no opinion on QBE. I follow US, Some Canadian and Bermuda insurers, but nothing more.