The company and its investors float other ideas like phone insurance or even building a more secure version of Android.

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Like Buffett, whom Watsa admires, Watsa built his financial empire around a solid insurance business, which provided him with a growing float to invest.

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The actually writing of insurance policies is just a method of gaining access to that float.

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Or buy an insurance company and then apply your investment skills to investing the float?

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So to some extent we can view an insurance company as actually a large investment fund: investing that float for however long the company gets to keep it.

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The three drivers of returns on equity in insurance, remember, are the investment yield, the cost of float and leverage.

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