Top 10 Financial Companies To Own In Right Now

Top 10 Financial Companies To Own In Right Now: Arch Capital Group Ltd.(ACGL)

Arch Capital Group Ltd., together with its subsidiaries, provides insurance and reinsurance products worldwide. It operates in two segments, Insurance and Reinsurance. The Insurance segment offers casualty; construction; executive assurance; healthcare; collateral protection, debt cancellation, and service contract reimbursement products; national accounts casualty; professional liability; programs; property, energy, marine, and aviation; surety; and travel and accident insurance products. It also provides other insurance products, such as excess workers compensation and employers' liability insurance coverages for qualified self-insured groups, associations, and trusts; captive insurance programs; and accident, disability, and medical plan insurance coverages for employer groups, medical plan members, students, and other participant groups. This segment markets its products through a network of licensed independent retail and wholesale brokers. The Reinsurance segment rei nsures third party liability and worker?s compensation exposures; individual property risks that include personal lines and commercial property exposures; other specialty lines, including surety, accident and health, workers' compensation catastrophe, multi-peril crop, trade credit, and political risk; catastrophic perils, such as hurricane, earthquake, flood, tornado, hail, and fire; marine business, which includes coverage for hull, cargo, and transit and offshore oil and gas operations, as well as aviation business that comprises coverage for airline and general aviation risks; and non-traditional business to provide insurers with risk management solutions. This segment markets its reinsurance products through brokers, as well as directly with the ceding companies. The company was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Hamilton, Bermuda.

Advisors' Opinion:

• [By Ben Levisohn]

  For the past several years, Berkshire has contrasted its own cost-free float provided by profitable underwriting against the industry's (unimpressive) tendency to lose money on underwriting while generating net returns from investment income. So far, so good. Less edifying, though, is the repeated contrast of Berkshire's track record of profitability to State Farm's…even though, as a mutual company, State Farm's profitability goals are inherently different from for-profit insurers like Berkshire. It's true that through year-end 2013, Berkshire's underwriters have "now operated at an underwriting profit for eleven consecutive years," but so have ACE (ACE), American Financial (AFG),  AmTrust Financial (AFSI), Arch Capital (ACGL), Chubb (CB), HCC (HCC), Progressive (PGR), RLI (RLI), and W.R. Berkley (WRB), any or all of whom provide a more meaningful comparison than contrasting Berkshire's results to a company that's not out to produce a profit in t he first place.

• [By Holly LaFon]

  Arch Capital (ACGL)'s Dinos Iordanu recently described to our analysts how he met me in 2001. Before we invested in his business, we asked him all sorts of personal questions about how he came to America from Cyprus; whether or not his wife had a job; and how big was his house? He told our analysts that "Ron was trying to get a sense of me. He wanted to understand how I viewed risk. No one else asked us such questions. They were the right questions since you were investing in our business, which was assuming underwriting risk on your behalf. "We got it right with Dinos and have about quadrupled our money in the past twelve years, not exactly the most propitious time to invest in stocks! Of course, there can be no assurance that future investments will be as profitable…although you can be assured that we will continue to work hard to try to achieve similar results.

source from Top Stocks For 2015:http://www.topstocksblog.com/top-10-financial-companies-to-own-in-right-now-2.html