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- Manlobbi
Stocks A to Z / Stocks B / Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) ❤
No. of Recommendations: 2
No. of Recommendations: 7
Certainly gets our attention! I feel very confident Ajit & our talented team have researched, prepared and priced coverage quite well. He has spoiled us and really exceeded his own high standards last year! I hope he continues in his key role for another decade plus! My brother recently bought a coastal place in the Southeast (Atlantic side) so I pay more attention to the winds nowadays.🤞
No. of Recommendations: 4
Doesn't mean much...
A very QUIET season with only 1 named storm--a powerful one that strikes population centers up the east coast could be devastating.
An extremely ACTIVE season with numerous strong storms that don't strike population centers or don't strike land at all--is an insurance nonevent season
So these forecasts are not only pretty useless for their accuracy--but even when they ARE accurate they can be useless from an insurance projection perspective.
It's not how many storms/how active--its WHERE they hit. Buffett alluded to this at the meeting "if strong winds blow the storms west"....
There's a 70% chance what I wrote here is accurate lol
No. of Recommendations: 0
Correction--meant "blow the storms EAST" not west obviously
No. of Recommendations: 3
Correction--meant "blow the storms EAST" not west obviously
It depends what the rest of the sentence says. We'll be ok if strong winds blow the storms East; we'll be in trouble if strong winds blow the storms West. The storms we mostly worry about are in the Atlantic, and so we who live on the East coast (or provide insurance coverage to such people) don't want those stoms to be blown West towards us.
Of course storms are insurance non-events if they don't hit the (East) coast, but a bad storm year with twice as many bad storms should generally mean that we have twice the risk of sustaining one that hits a big population centre.
But I suspect the risk factors cited in the report ("near-record warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean, development of La Nina conditions in the Pacific, reduced Atlantic trade winds and less wind shear, all of which tend to favor tropical storm formation") have been pretty well known for a while, and so I am optimistic that the rates Berkshire obtains for this coverage are commensurate with the risk. And in general, more risk means more business, which in the long-term average means more earnings, so we probably shouldn't complain. (Although we can fret...)
dtb
No. of Recommendations: 4
Excellent points,yes.
A good example of why “active” and “destructive” are often 2 different stories. Last year’s hurricane season turned out to be very active. Yet, damage was relatively light. There was that one strong hurricane that ran across a mostly rural area of north central FLA.
This latest forecast calls for 4-7 major hurricanes. That’s a lot of bullets to dodge, if true.
Risk is permanent. Rates are variable. I suspect this type of forecast is only HELPFUL in the pricing arena, yes.
No. of Recommendations: 2
"But I suspect the risk factors cited in the report ("near-record warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean, development of La Nina conditions in the Pacific, reduced Atlantic trade winds and less wind shear, all of which tend to favor tropical storm formation") have been pretty well known for a while, and so I am optimistic that the rates Berkshire obtains for this coverage are commensurate with the risk"https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/05/what-yo...I don't believe they are "near records" unfortunately. We are off the charts right now and I don't think that naive usage of existing models is going to be a work out well. I suspect Berkshire has some great minds looking at the problem. I've never seen anything like this year, I thought I'd be dead before the climate started changing like this.
No. of Recommendations: 1
I don't believe they are "near records" unfortunately. We are off the charts right now and I don't think that naive usage of existing models is going to be a work out well. I suspect Berkshire has some great minds looking at the problem. I've never seen anything like this year, I thought I'd be dead before the climate started changing like this.
I gather there's a solar maximum about now, so there's probably a local peak effect, as well as the underlying trend. Maybe it will calm down a bit (for a while) in the next year or two (or few? not sure of the timescale).
SA
