2011 Markel Breakfast Notes

Dear Readers,

I hope everyone has enjoyed the notes from the Berkshire Meeting and from the Value Investing Congress. I have heard from a lot of people and so far the consensus has been that the notes were pretty comprehensive. I feel very fortunate to have readers all around the world who I can communicate with and get to know. This has been a very busy time of year for me and I wanted to make sure I took the time to thank everyone for following my blog and my career. I am still looking for the right full-time opportunity for after graduation so feel free to email me if you know of any equity value funds who are looking for a research analyst.

Before I move on I wanted to apologize again. For about a 6 hour period on Sunday night the version of the Value Investing Congress notes available through Scribd was not a complete version. Accordingly, if you downloaded a version that is missing stock charts for each of the companies, please feel free to email me and I will send you the polished version.

I know that you all have a lot to read right now but I wanted to post my notes from the 2011 Markel Breakfast while the comments and content were still very relevant and timely. For those of you who have not been to Omaha during the Berkshire weekend, the Markel Breakfast is held the Sunday after the Berkshire meeting and is a standing room only event. I was lucky enough to get a seat right in front and had the opportunity to hear CIO Tom Gayner and Vice Chairman of the Board Steve Markel discuss a number of topics, including:

• The state of the municipal bond market
• The state of the property and casualty insurance market
• Markel's approach to buying whole companies
• Inflation, hedging and currency risk
• The David Sokol affair

As usual, I have embedded a Scribd document of my notes in this post. While they are only a little over 8 pages, they are a bit too long to read on a regular blog post. If you have any trouble with Scribd, click this link to access a Google Docs copy (with no sign-in required). If neither of those options works, feel free to email me at inoculatedinvestor@gmail.com and I will gladly send you a PDF copy of the notes.

Finally, I wanted to let you know that there is still one more set of notes yet to be released. I attended the Creighton Value Investing Panel in Omaha and got to hear investors such as Vitaliy Katsenelson and Whitney Tilson answer questions from two moderators. It was an interesting event and I encourage you to stay tuned for the notes.

Thanks again for all of your support and I hope you enjoy the Markel notes.

Sincerely,

Ben Claremon

UCLA Anderson 2011

The Inoculated Investor

Markel Breakfast 2011 Notes