Traveler's Shares Outstanding

TRV is up 2% today after reporting another strong quarter.  Even though insurance stocks have done relatively well over the last year, Property Casualty insurance is a line of business that is often misunderstood and unloved by Wall Street.  It's a highly competitive business with few barriers to entry, but in some ways that makes the industry even more interesting to study.  If there's one thing that P/C companies understand it's that the name of their game is to grow book value per share.  To that end, they are not bashful about buying back stock when they don't have a more efficient use for capital.  As evidence, below is a chart of TRV's share count since 2005.  Over that time period, the company has bought back almost half of its shares.

ACE Insurance Commentary 2Q12

ACE Runs a crop insurance book.  Evan Greenberg, the CEO had this to say about the drought conditions:

Evan Greenberg

You’re correct, this is the, these are the worst drought conditions that we have seen in the, that has been experienced in the forming community since 1988. It is broad-based though it is very much concentrated in the mid-west states and in 1988 crop insurance was much less factor in the overall financial pluming of the agriculture industry. It's far more wide spread and taken up as a valuable protection and this is center piece for the support of the agriculture industry today than it was in 1988.