transcript has been published by Seeking Alpha<\/a>).<\/p>\nGross written premiums were $1.3 billion for the first quarter of 2015, compared to $1.4 billion from 2014. They were down because of the conservative underwriting politics of Markel within a still very competitive market.<\/p>\n
Very impressive indeed the decline of the consolidated combined ratio, down from 95% in Q1 2014 to 83% this quarter, due to improvements in prior accident year’s and current accident year’s loss ratio and due to a 2% improvement of the expense ratio this year.<\/p>\n
But finally after several difficult quarters the best news came from \u201eMarkel Ventures\u201c:
\nRevenues jumped 43% from $ 171 million to $ 245 million this year. Net income to shareholders improved from approximately $ 1 million in Q1 2014 to $ 11 million this quarter. This impressive increase is primarely due to the acquisition of Cottrell and to improved results within other manufacturing operations!<\/p>\n
General investment income increased to $93 million for the first quarter of 2015, compared to $87 million last year amidst the repositioning of the investment portfolio acquired through the Alterra transaction.<\/p>\n
Book value per share, the most important ratio of the insurance industry was $564 at the end of March 2015, an increase of 4% since the end of 2014.<\/p>\n
At Friday’s closing price of $780.43 the market values Markel at 1.4 price \/ book value per share.<\/p>\n
Not cheap but not too expensive either:\u00a0Markel remains a buy!<\/p>\n
The results are improving rapidly after the Alterra integration and we can now see were Markel Ventures could be headed within a couple of years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Markel’s stock (NYSE: MKL) jumped more than 4% after releasing Q1 2015 results, which is very unusual for this company. What happened? \u201eThe company is off to a fantastic start in 2015 with our investing, underwriting and Markel Ventures operations all contributing to our success\u201c CFO Anne Waleski pointed out on the conference call (as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.asmus-puhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.asmus-puhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.asmus-puhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.asmus-puhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.asmus-puhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1629"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.asmus-puhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1637,"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.asmus-puhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions\/1637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.asmus-puhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.asmus-puhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.asmus-puhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}