Name: Bottom-Up Investing in a Top-Down World
Uploaded: 2025-08-26T20:22:00Z
Duration: 1 min 49 s
Description: Tom Gayner, CEO of Markel Group, tells Barron’s Andy Serwer how the macro environment of the stock market informs his investing strategies.

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Tom Gayner, CEO of Markel Group, spoke about how the holding company has studied Berkshire Hathaway's playbook, Markel's stock performance, and much more.

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Tom Gayner, CEO of Markel Group, tells Barron’s Andy Serwer how the macro environment of the stock market informs his investing strategies.

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250826/c385558f-4d25-4e85-8b13-1a4f7f4bbafb/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Bottom-Up Investing in a Top-Down World

I know you're a bottoms-up investor, but do you ever look top down, Tom, and have macro thoughts about the stock market or the economy that impact what you're doing in one of your three business units?

It would be absolutely impossible. And frankly, irresponsible not to be somewhat thoughtful about what you observe in the macro environment and what's going on in a top-down environment. That said, that tends to be the sort of thing over which you don't have any control. So you're thoughtful, you look at things, you think about some of the pluses and minuses. You think about the risk-reward. I mean, it's the fundamental nature of the way we run every single one of our businesses. And it's inherent to the discipline of insurance that you think about the risk you're taking and the reward you're receiving in exchange for that risk. And that's as basic as it gets. But that being said, you then need to make specific decisions which come from the bottom-up. And one of the people who I've learned from and studied, again, and this goes back 40 or 50 years, and this was a book given to me by my grandmother when I might have been in seventh or eighth grade, but it was by John Train, who was a great financial writer, if you recall him. And one of John Train's comments was: "Investing is the art of the specific." So there is a specific company, a specific idea, a specific price, and you make a decision about that. So you don't ignore what's going on from the top down, what we are actually going to do, for everybody, even if they are a macro-based investor, is what you do from the bottom up in the specific decisions.

Bottom-Up Investing in a Top-Down World

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