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Great post! Love the analysis. An easier method to get liquidity from this vehicle would be to use dividends as management already owns 44% of FIH right? So from $250M of normalized earning they could pull some out and make it a dividend play. Basically anything except a 2-20 tax on investor. It is a bad idea when you run with other people's capital but insane when you already own 43% of it.

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what's a more reasonable fee structure do you think to be able to use the Fairfax name and lean on their balance sheet/cost of capital? 50m/yr off of a ~4bn book they are managing doesn't seem outrageous. Agree that it causes a drag but seems like there's some benefit there too unless I'm missing something.

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The fee itself is fine, if it were fixed at $50M or even $50M growing annually with inflation, which would translate to a net present value of all future fees at around $400-500M . The problem is that the fees are based on book value and un-deployed cash, which i expect to compound at a high rate, leading a an NPV of future fees of $2-4Bn, which is a significant drag on the overall value of the company.

See the calculations here for reference: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZMy4FDPnmPt-ocPnNQgkGL9d-Vtbr2ntocjI6fP_Gp0/edit

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