W.R. Berkley ($WRB) podcast mentions

  1. Sure. So Harry Brown, a genius libertarian philosopher and economist, he came up with the idea that if you just rebalance every year and you put 25% of your assets into stocks, then you're always going to make money when there's a bull market. And if you put 25% of your money into bonds, then when there's a bear market and bonds rally, you also do fine. You can hedge your stocks with your bonds. And he says, yeah, we have a paper economy, so there's going to be some inflation. So you can hedge your bonds by putting 25% in gold, and then you have 25% in cash so that when you rebalance every year, you can take advantage of when the markets have a drawdown, and that'll reduce your volatility over time. So it's 25% in stocks, 25% in long bonds, 25% in gold, and 25% in cash or short duration fixed income. And I looked at that and I said, "Okay, that all makes sense to me." But Harry Browne unfortunately passed away before Bitcoin was invented. So I want to have gold and Bitcoin. And as you know, I'm a huge fan of gold streamers. I think that's the very best way to own gold. So my gold bucket is not just bullion, it's bullion and gold streamers and Bitcoin. That's one small change to it. The bigger change is I don't believe that long Duration fixed income is investible. So instead, I've put 25% into a very carefully selected, high-quality group of property and casualty insurance companies. And if you don't know much about those stocks, you're like, "What? That doesn't make any sense. What are you talking about?" Well, if you go and you look at, say, W.R. Berkley, which is probably the highest quality property and casualty insurance company in the world, if you look at W.R. Berkley and you see, "Oh, the market cap is $25 billion." Okay, great. What's in their balance sheet? And their balance sheet is $25 billion worth of fixed income. So these companies trade on the value of their balance sheets, and their balance sheets are all fixed income. Now, why do I wanna, if I don't believe that long duration fixed income is investible, then why do I own an insurance company? 'Cause you know they're gonna own a bunch of bonds.
    Porter Stansberry · Mining Stock Daily · Porter Stansberry: America’s Broken Money, Gold and the Road to 2029 · 2026-09-04
  2. Well, because they can actively manage the duration risk. So they can hedge the duration risk and they can also just move themselves into the short end of the curve. So for example, W.R. Berkley between 2019 and 2022 when the long end of the curve got so cheap, in terms of the yield going all the way down, Bill Berkley moved his entire portfolio to an average duration of less than 1 year. And he said, "If you're not gonna pay me to take duration risk, then I'm not gonna take any." So he moved the whole book into treasuries, into T-bills. And what a genius move. And if you go and you look at that stock over that period of time, 2019 to 2024, by far the best performing insurance company because he had the very best bond manager at the helm. And so I'm just letting, I'm letting the people who are the best in the world at managing duration risk manage my duration risk for me.
    Porter Stansberry · Mining Stock Daily · Porter Stansberry: America’s Broken Money, Gold and the Road to 2029 · 2026-09-04
  3. So I went and looked over the last 100 years for what are the very best industries to be an investor in, because there are some investors that have structural advantages that lead to a much higher return on capital. I wish you the best, but if you're running a mine, you're not going to beat Coca-Cola. It's not going to happen. You're not going to beat W.R. Berkley. It's not going to happen. So I want my capital to be in industries that have huge structural advantages where you could have a persistent return on capital that's way above the market average. So I don't want to own anything that can't have a long-term return on equity of at least 15% and ideally over 20%. And there's just no way that a mine can do that. It's not possible. You can do that if you buy the royalty at the right price.
    Porter Stansberry · Mining Stock Daily · Porter Stansberry: America’s Broken Money, Gold and the Road to 2029 · 2026-09-04