Subject: Re: Other than Berkshire...
I just happened to be looking at Fairfax's historical results, and thought the comparison with Berkshire might be interesting.

We know Berkshire has had an unbelievable almost 20% annual growth in book value since Buffett began 60 years ago, in 1965. Fairfax only started in 1985, so it is about 20 years behind. Either the most recent 40 years have been less favourable to the stock markets, or Berkshire's size has slowed it down, or probably both, since Berkshire's book value return since 1985 is 14-15%, according to perplexity.ai, and without having done the calculation myself, this seems plausible.

Fairfax, on the other hand, has grown its book value by 18.7-18.9% in the same time period, again according to perplexity (this number includes the small dividend that Fairfax pays, about 1% currently, whereas Berkshire has paid no dividends except for once, I believe it was a 10c dividend in 1967, which Buffett now calls a 'bad dream'.)

Also, Berkshire's P/B of 1.69 is currently above its long term P:B ratio; Fairfax's ratio of 1.52, while up a bit in the past few years, is still below its long-term average.

There are other differences: Buffett likes to only swing the bat at sure things, Watsa takes some bigger swings and sometimes strikes out. Berkshire has some leverage from float, i.e. about $171b for $649b of book value at year end, whereas Fairfax has a much greater amount of float in relation to its book value, $36.9b in float for $23.0b in book value, so where Berkshire's floats provide another 26% of investable assets, Fairfax's float provides another 160%. This might make Fairfax the more dangerous investment, except that most of the float is invested in treasuries, because of insurance regulatory restrictions, so it's not as dangerous as it might seem.

As Jim says, there have been multi-year flat stretches (particularly 2010 to about 2018) where some of the macro bets and shorting went sour, and whereas Watsa has now sworn off shorting, he will undoubtedly continue to keep an eye on macro more than the 15 minutes a year that Buffett recommends.

Anyways, I just thought I would mention that, although it is true that Berkshire has a longer history to rely on, 60 years instead of 40, forty years is still a pretty long period to generate annual returns just a hair under 20%. Fairfax is small (it would be the S&P's 330th biggest company if it was based in the US), so it may still have a reasonably long runway if it can keep anywhere near its historical performance.

Regards, DTB