Fairfax Financial Holdings LimitedFigures

Fairfax is an insurer that invests its float, that is the premium money it holds while waiting to pay claims. The company is listed in Toronto, has been run since 1985 by the same man, and keeps its accounts in US dollars while its shares trade in Canadian dollars. It publishes no revalued net asset value: its reference measure is book value per share, that is equity divided by the number of shares. Its doctrine is printed on the first folio of every annual report, ahead of the accounts themselves. The objective there is quantified: compound that book value per share by 15% a year over the long term, and the company adds a clause that is no ornament, at the expense of short-term profits if necessary. The next principle confirms it: what counts is long-run growth in book value per share, not quarterly earnings. Over forty years the company publishes compound annual growth of 18.3% from 1985 to 2025.

Three further statements complete the doctrine. Investing is always conducted on a long-term, value-oriented philosophy. Protecting capital comes before return: the house says it looks first for ways to minimise loss. And the shape of the centre is set out in one sentence: Fairfax will always be a very small holding company and never an operating company. Subsidiaries are decentralised and run by their presidents; the centre keeps only performance evaluation, succession, acquisitions, financing and investments.

A quoted doctrine is worth nothing, a measured one is worth something. Line by line, between the two most recent US quarterly filings of 31 December 2025 and 31 March 2026, eighteen of the twenty-seven common lines did not move by a single share, that is two thirds of the declared portfolio. Two caveats prevent over-reading the measure: that filing covers only 19.98% of the group's listed equities, recalculated, and the largest move of the quarter is not in it. The house itself puts forward one line to illustrate its patience, Eurobank. Initial purchase in April 2014 at EUR 31.00 a share, participation in a capital increase in November 2015 at EUR 1.00, merger of Grivalia in May 2019 at EUR 0.38, for a final all-in cost of EUR 0.94 a share on 1.3 billion shares. The published annualised return starts at -7% at end-2020 and reaches 15% at 27 February 2026. But the same letter names the limit of patience, and it is its most honest passage: BlackBerry. That position fell from 35,820,891 shares at 30 September 2025 to 26,264,199 at 6 May 2026. A holding can also shrink without any conviction changing: Fairfax sold 96.9 million Eurobank shares in 2025 in order to stay below the regulatory threshold of 33.3%.

Capital returns to shareholders through buybacks, and this is a first-rank channel, not an accessory. In 2025, 1,006,535 shares were bought back for cancellation, for USD 1,625.2m. In the first half of 2026 alone, 1,055,190 shares for USD 1,720.6m, or USD 1,630.61 a share: more in six months than in the whole of the previous year. Shares effectively outstanding fall from 20,856,086 to 19,969,895, that is 4.2% fewer in half a year. The comparison is worth making: the house paid 1.29 times, recalculated, a book value per share of USD 1,260.19 at 31 December 2025. That is a fact about behaviour, not a reference price: it says what management agreed to pay, not what the share is worth. On the bond side, finally, the house takes a position: at 30 June 2026, 77% of the portfolio is in government bonds, 12% in high-quality, mostly short-dated corporate bonds and 11% in first-lien mortgage loans, for an average term to maturity of 3.2 years.