One of the best pitches from the VALUEx conference; My 2008 and 2009 monthly letters; Issue of Goldman Sachs' women partners leaving the firm; Greetings from Jackson Hole
1) When I was at Guy Spier's VALUEx conference in Switzerland at the end of January, one of the best pitches I heard was Mariya Messerli's presentation on specialty insurer Markel (MKL)...
I have a long history with the company – dating back more than 20 years when I got to know Chairman Steve Markel and the then-Chief Investment Officer and current CEO Tom Gayner.
Every year, they hosted a "brunch" event in Omaha the same weekend as the Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) annual meeting. The type of investor who owned Berkshire also often owned Markel for similar reasons: an excellent insurance business run by smart, honest people who invested with a value bent.
If you want to learn more about Tom, I recommend this podcast episode, which is on YouTube here:
Markel has nearly matched the astonishing performance of Berkshire's A-shares for most of the past four decades, as you can see in this chart:
I couldn't share Mariya's presentation on Markel earlier this year because, by coincidence, my team and I had just recommended the stock in the February issue of our flagship newsletter, Stansberry's Investment Advisory – and we always give our best ideas to our paid subscribers first.
In fact, subscribers who followed our advice are up 8% since our February issue.
(Investment Advisory subscribers can read that issue on Markel right here. And if you aren't a subscriber, learn how to become one – and how to gain access to the entire portfolio of open positions, plus upcoming monthly issues with new recommendations – by clicking here.)
But now that a month and a half has passed, I'm able to share Mariya's excellent work, with her permission – you can download her 22-slide presentation here and her 15-page write-up here.
In her pitch, she highlighted that Markel, like Berkshire, is known for its disciplined underwriting:
Mariya also noted that, like Berkshire, Markel has a "remarkable culture"...
... and "management of high skill and integrity":
Lastly, Mariya estimated that Markel's intrinsic value is $2,426 per share (that's more than 60% above yesterday's closing price of $1,510 per share):
Thank you for allowing me to share your work, Mariya!
2) In yesterday's e-mail, the third and final one about how I navigated the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, I shared the monthly letter I sent on March 3, 2009 to investors in the hedge funds I was managing at the time – only six days before the generational bottom.
For those who are interested in learning more about what I was thinking and doing – and how I was communicating with my investors – I've compiled two PDFs of my 2008 (328 pages) and 2009 (201 pages) monthly letters. Enjoy!
3) There are so few women at the highest levels of finance – a topic about which I published two articles in the New York Times in 2014: Evaluating the Dearth of Female Hedge Fund Managers and A Deeper Conversation on Women in Hedge Funds.
So I read with great interest this Wall Street Journal article last week: Women Aren't Getting the Big Jobs at Goldman Sachs, and They're Heading for the Exits. Excerpt:
Roughly two-thirds of the women who were partners at the end of 2018 have left the firm or no longer have the title, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. The same can be said of just under half of male partners at the time.
No woman currently runs a major division or is seen internally as a credible candidate to one day succeed Solomon. Two of the eight executive officers at Goldman are women – in legal and accounting, nonrevenue generating positions.
In Goldman's core division of investment banking and markets, a number of star women partners have left or are no longer partners after they saw little or no path to moving up the ranks. Many women who left the firm found better opportunities elsewhere.
Sadly, it doesn't appear that much has improved since I wrote those articles a decade ago. While Goldman may be having bigger problems in this area than its peers, it clearly remains a systemic issue...
4) After my usual half-day at home (I got back from the Bahamas on Friday evening), my wife Susan and I flew to Jackson Hole, Wyoming on Saturday morning to spend time with our oldest daughter and her boyfriend, as well as Susan's younger brother and his family.
The weather has been spectacular – 50 degrees and not a cloud in the sky – though the snow on the ski slopes gets pretty mashed-potato-y by midday...
Here's a picture of five of the eight of us:
Best regards,
Whitney
P.S. I welcome your feedback – send me an e-mail by clicking here.