Markel at $1789.50, gradually falling, down from a peak around $2200 last December, and definitely sliding in the last 3-4 weeks. It may keep sliding a bit longer.

It's a nice boring firm, which can be good. Like many firms they are often described as a smaller Berkshire Hathaway, but it's more true for Markel than it is for most firms they say that about: they run insurance businesses and have some wholly owned subsidiaries. They even own some Berkshire stock.

It's not screamingly cheap, but nicer than usual.

The two bullish thoughts:

* P/B currently 1.168, definitely at the low end of the range, last 10 years roughly 1.11-1.74. Median only 1.354 since the credit crunch. So there's likely some return to be had just by mean reversion.

* Book per share has risen 9.75%/year in the last 10 years. So things will rise in value while you wait. If I squint at the numbers a bit too long, I generalize recent value growth rate as inflation + 7.1%/year.

So it is not inconceivable that one might see a one-time ~15-20% bump on top of a trend around nominal ~9%/year thereafter.

It does go in and out of fashion as the years go by, so expect stretches of high and low valuations to come and go. So it's not necessarily a good place to "park" money you might need within a year or two, but it probably suits a "coffee can" approach quite well.

Jim