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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Rudd who wrote (9495)	1/4/2000 9:10:00 AM
From: Freedom Fighter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78519

Bob, I've been contemplating the same issue. I have no conclusions. I just upped my position in Mecury General (MCY) and they use independent agents so it may be a bigger factor for them. I'm not certain how much you actually save via internet though. You still have to advertise/spend money to get business or links to your page. I wish I could find some numbers. One part of the equation (at least in MCY's case) is that agents can act like a front line underwriting process and increase the quality of the business. If you gain any insights let me know. Wayne

To: Bob Rudd who wrote (9495)	1/4/2000 9:19:00 AM
From: James Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78519

Geico has a great web offering where you can load in all your information and then they'll get you a quote in a few days. Their competitors can't do that yet because the cannot undermine their agents. Geico was free to experiment, and did.

To: Bob Rudd who wrote (9495)	1/4/2000 10:46:00 AM
From: LauA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78519

Portraying Buffett as a technophobe is rather silly. I believe he's said that he cannot look out 10 years and guestimate the ROC(E) for a given tech company with any margin of safety. He's never said that GEICO or any other captive company cannot USE technology. I'm willing to bet that Buffett was playing bridge across the net before many of the posters here were even aware of the WWW. GEICO is doing something rather simple: they are burning $1-200 million in airway advertising to raise their market share from 2% to 10%. It's a commodity market where GEICO can be the lowest priced producer. Whether customers use an 800 number or http:// is irrelevant. The important thing is the name GEICO (it's no longer Government Employees Insurance Company, just GEICO). I think that what's been weighing down BRK are the former GNR shareholders who figured that they've been snookered, and some of the cultists who have jumped the Omaha Express to ride Netopia. Maybe there'll be some empty seats in the Aksarben this year. Lau