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

To: Jurgis Bekepuris who wrote (48296)	6/8/2012 3:15:16 PM
From: Spekulatius	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 78618

re Insurance companies. I still have AXS and AHL (purchased near the lows) in my taxable account. I sold positions in AHL and a partial in AXS in my IRA's. I don't own BRK right now but would below 75$. The main issue with the low interest rates is with long tail insurance (Life etc.) nor the reinsurance companies, since the latter can (doesn't mean they do) reprice their rates every year or so.I recently upped my position in MET and purchased some NWLI. both are very cheap based on tangible book value and NWLI at least has extreme amount of excessive cash. MET feels that they are hedged to withstand low interest rates for several years according to their management presentations and filings. MET also has suffered by the failed stress test (soon to be irrelevant once they get rid of their bank holding status after the sale of their mortgage banking ops is concluded) and the European debt crisis ( not very relevant either, since they hold very little PIG debt). Short of a meltdown of the financial system, both should be fine. NWLI issue is that there is no catalyst, even though one investor that post in SI (batman2003) thinks that the board feels pressure to do something. As far as L is concerned, they are very good at capital allocation but not that good at running their business. Examples are CNA (which is actually improving but very slowly) and BWP (which has mismanaged their expansion projects in 2007/2008)