Dealraker, Thank you for pointing out AJG and BRO. Both companies have beautiful 10 year charts, beautiful revenue and profits growth. There is some dilution and I'm guessing some/all acquisitions are stock swaps, yes? AJG has a high P/E at the present.

Please help me with the following questions:
' How much future growth runway do you see for BRO and AJG?
' Are there times when they have more attractive valuations or are they essentially Costco type situations where it does not matter all that much when you enter?
' There is a heck of a lot of rolling up now occurring in the property and casualty local agent industry. I know of two separate groups literally gobbling up all the best local agent groups here in the Southeast and I'm told doing the same elsewhere. My fellow Rotarian merged his large footprint local business into one of these two groups and now he is managing 3X larger footprint as more groups are being pulled into the system. He is young, excellent manager and the group he is in is putting him in charge of more agencies in adjacent metro centers. His view is it is get large or go out of business one day. The central thesis is the insurance companies want to reduce their support expenses so they are happy with the massing of local agencies and the local agents see they need to mass up so as to have leverage with the insurance companies. I cannot say I fully understand those seemingly opposing dynamics. It seems to me this is the long running trend of systems seeking greater size for survival and profits that has been seen in many industries. What will all this rolling up of insurance agencies by now private behemoths that will one day to be public entities do to AJG and BRO? With they snap up these pre-packaged groups of successful (the best local agencies)?

BTW, I wished I looked closely at AJG years ago when you were mentioning your AJG holdings. It was a case of my not being interested in insurance at the time. AJG has a better looking stock appreciation chart than BRK and many other holdings in my portfolio.

Uwharrie