Prem Watsa's Dividend Stock Portfolio: Every Holding Analyzed

In many pursuits, newcomers are so far removed from the experts that it is difficult to learn from the best.
This is not the case with investing. Investors can easily learn from (and imitate) the investment decisions of successful institutional investors - the best in the business.
One example of this is Prem Watsa.
As the Chief Executive Officer of Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. (OTCPK: FRFHF), a Canadian insurance company, Watsa is the portfolio manager for an impressive sum of insurance float. About $1.1 billion of this is invested in publicly-traded common stocks.
This article will analyze Prem Watsa’s dividend stock investment portfolio in detail.
Prem Watsa’s Investment Style
Prem Watsa is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd, a Canadian insurer and investment manager. Fairfax’s operations are remarkably similar to those of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A) (NYSE: BRK-B). The company’s insurance operations are consistently profitable (as measured by the combined ratio), which means that Fairfax is consistently generating useable capital known as insurance float.
I could give an adequate explanation of insurance float, but I’ll instead refer to Warren Buffett’s - the master of generating wealth via insurance float - explanation of insurance float from Berkshire Hathaway’s 2007 Annual... Read more