Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I was listening to the translations very carefully on the headphone because your English surpasses my German in ways that I can't even begin. It would approach infinity if you're doing the math. And I'm encouraged as I see so many in the audience actually not putting the headphones on as I speak in English because your language skills are so much better than mine. But thank you very much for your time here today. I enjoyed Dr. Lebert's presentation quite thoroughly and I might pick up on some of the themes that you mentioned. I would especially be delighted for questions that you would have and I will leave time at the end of my presentation for your questions. It helps me to know what is on your mind to speak directly to those as opposed to talking about things from my own point of view without the empathy of considering things from your point of view.
So Dr. Lieber was kind enough to invite me today and it is an act of kindness and you're very flattering in your comparisons to Berkshire and Buffett. So, I'm flattered and humbled by that. It's an unfair comparison, but I will do the best I can both to live up to your expectations today as well as to run Markel in such a way that over time those comparisons may in fact be more accurate and appropriate over time. When Dr. Lieber invited me, as he pointed out, this is a long way to come for one day, but I eagerly accepted the invitation. And here's why. I would very much like for more Germans, for more Europeans to own Markel shares. We would welcome your partnership. We would be grateful for that. And I think one of the reasons that would be mutually beneficial and win-win is that in essence Markel in many ways is a multi-generation family holding company. And that is a concept and a style and a way of doing business that Germans have done for hundreds of years. You've been doing it for longer than America has existed. And some of the historical examples that Dr. Lieber spoke of illustrate the point that before America was even an idea, this has been going on in this part of the world for a very long time. So the way in which we run Markel and the way in which we think about things I think matches and is resonant with the way that you all have run and organized businesses for hundreds of years and with the time horizon that salutes multi-generation. Sometimes that's a little harder a message to resonate in the US than it is in Germany and in Europe in particular. So I'm very grateful for the invitation to be here and we'll talk about history and things like that in the course.
Now unfortunately being an American I'm constrained by certain regulatory constraints that exist in our country. So this very first slide I have to show you. Wow. The guy came all the way from America to tell me this. This is our forward-looking statement. Our attorneys say that I have to put that slide up there before we do anything else. So, you are experienced investors. I'm sure you've seen that before. I will spare you the task of reading it out loud. It says that I may say things about the future which may or may not come true. And well, that's an accurate thing because anytime we're talking about the future, I'll admit first and foremost that I don't know. But that slide is up there.
So next point quoting Steve Jobs to understand Markel and sometimes people think of Markel and they think boy that's complicated and actually I disagree. I don't think we're complicated. I think we're a very simple business and as Jobs said simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. So, let me connect back to the idea of us being a multi-generation family holding company. There's two parts of Markel to get down to its most simple thing. There's the part of our business which is involved in the making of the money and then there's the second part which is involved in the reinvesting of the money and taking that money and compounding it over time. And I think any company that you would invest in or any company that you would look at, they will almost, I can't imagine one that would not pass the first test, they're going to tell you their plan, their strategy, and how they would make money. That is what a company is organized to do in so many ways. But many times that would be the end of the story. And they may be able to reinvest in their own business or do more of the thing that they're designed to do, but they don't talk about what they would invest that money in allied or other things over time, which is where the mathematics of compounding begin to occur.
There was an article, anybody know the name Steve Ballmer? Does that ring any bells with you? So I see some nods. He followed Bill Gates, was the second CEO of Microsoft. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal within the last two or three months that talked about how successful an investor Steve Ballmer had been and both holding on to his Microsoft. In fact, I think he owns more Microsoft stock than Bill Gates does these days because he held on to it. He owns the basketball team and he has made some other investments as well. And he talked about Microsoft, which is also one of our holdings, as a two-trick pony. And it speaks to that idea of both making money and then reinvesting the money. And the two tricks, he says, so the zero trick pony is a pony that doesn't do very well. And we've all been around long enough and been in the investment business long enough that there are investments we made that we might have thought well of and had a theory about, but it just didn't work. So that's a zero trick pony. There are investments where a thesis was laid out, the idea was laid out, the company did execute well on that and they made money. That's the one trick pony. He talked about Microsoft as a certain thesis, a certain idea. But over time, what happened was they were able to reinvest the money and change and adapt to circumstances as they changed and the world became a different place. That's the second trick. And those are the two trick ponies which become very fast racehorses over long, long periods of time. And Steve Ballmer had a couple of those over his career which is where that return came from. So the argument I'd like to make is that when you are confronted with some of the things we do at Markel and if that seems to you to be complex, distill it to its simplicity that we are both trying to operate a business and earn good returns from doing so and then we are trying to be very, very thoughtful about the way we would reinvest that over the course of time.
So that has worked very well for us. The company itself was started in 1930. So we are coming up on 100 years of history. We're not quite there yet, but for purposes of this conversation, we'll round up a little bit if you'll give us the grace to do so. I understand that in European context, that is a very short time frame. In America, we think of it as ancient. We think of 1930 as being back at the time that the pyramids were built. So different frame of reference, but I appreciate your grace in doing so. We went public in 1986. And I'll talk more about that in a minute. We've done very well, and I'll give you some numbers on that later in the presentation. It is also true that in the last few years, we have not done as well as what we've historically done. And I want to be very candid and share with you some of the reasons why I think that took place and what indeed we are doing about it. So what we are doing about it in terms of restoring our performance to historical levels are three things. One, as someone once said all problems are people problems and if things are not going as well as what they should over time that means either people will change or you have to change people one or the other. So we have indeed reshaped our leadership within several parts of the Markel company predominantly within our insurance operations which is the core and legacy building, legacy business of the company. Prior to 2023 we had a dual CEO structure that was the structure that was set up after the three family members who had run the business in the form of a triumvirate had retired from day-to-day roles. So dual CEO structure from 2016 to 2023. In 2023, we went to a single CEO structure. So it became my sole responsibility to be the CEO of the company. As part of that, we reestablished accountability. So we had in effect created matrix style reporting arrangements and matrix style leadership which perhaps led to ambiguity and lack of clarity as to who was responsible for what. So we have reshaped that gotten back to a single point of responsibility and focus and realigned around a clear strategy. So our strategy in the realm of insurance had gotten to be somewhat top down where we thought about the Markel brand and we thought about doing business all around the world and global connections from the top down. We found that not to have worked as well as what our original structure was which was more bottom up where we had people with specific lines of business with specific expertise with specific geographies where they did business. And we went back to that structure where the more bottom-up focus is what drives the company.
As I said the long-term record again has been one of success started in 1986. The compound annual growth rate in the share price and our calculations of intrinsic value around 15%. And again measured over a long time frame such as that. That's quite good. In the last five years ending the calendar year, it had slipped to about 9%. As we stand here today, it's back to 15%. And there is a little bit of a COVID starting point, end point weirdness that tracks that 5-year timeline. Where we stand right now, we are looking at post-COVID versus post-COVID comparisons. So we think that that five-year time frame that we use regularly is indeed more appropriate. So again in '23 when I became the sole CEO, one of the things we did and this may seem subtle but I think it's important is we changed the name of the company from the Markel Corporation to the Markel Group. Now and I'll speak more about this later. The Markel Group is a holding company and the holding company owns the insurance business. It owns all of the non-insurance businesses that we'd have and it manages the investment operations that we would be responsible for. And we've had a couple of name changes over the years over the 95 years of our existence. And this would be the most recent one where we went from Markel Services to Markel Corporation to Markel Group. So, Markel Group, what does Markel Group do? Markel Group has four responsibilities. First off, we're responsible for the culture of the organization. In modern terms, I would say culture equals software. So software that would drive something that would provide the language that would provide the formulas that would supply the algorithms by which decisions are being made. Really that's culture. The way in which people are wired, the way in which they make decisions, the way in which they think of time frames, the way they think of what's important and not important, the emphasis on candor, honesty, transparency, having a long-term time horizon. Those are all elements of culture, and I think they're extraordinarily important. It is difficult to put KPIs around culture. It's difficult to have metrics and measure them, but it's one of those things that you can sort of sense when it's not working and you can sense when somebody's values are perhaps somewhat different than what your own are or the values that we think are fundamentally important to drive the performance of the company. So the responsibility, the communication, the articulation, the reinforcement of the fact that our long-term culture is extraordinarily important to us. And we think it's critical not to take shortcuts or not to compromise that in any way. That is my responsibility and that is the responsibility of the holding company.
Secondly, and Buffett has talked about this many, many times over the years, one of the chief responsibilities, if not the chief responsibility of a CEO is that of capital allocation. The ultimate responsibility for making the decisions as to what one does with the money that is made where you reallocate it over time. The ultimate responsibility for capital allocation sits at the holding company and my team as well as I talking together are the ones who make that decision about where we put incremental capital at any particular point in time. As I pointed out in terms of people, none of this happens without people. And when you think about the people that are running businesses, leaders, is another way of saying people. So leadership, who is running, who is the person that is responsible for any given business we have. That is extraordinary. Perfect. I've got a cup. Thank you for your service. Thank you. Now I have two again. And I appreciate the hospitality. So leaders that is our responsibility. And in fact I have one of those leaders here with me today. Frederick Wolf I think. Where's there he is. Please thank you. Frederick runs our European business. He joined Markel in 2012. So he's been here 13 years now. He is a fabulous partner. He is a fabulous leader. His business has grown dramatically in those 13 years and his realm and range of responsibility has increased. And he's a classic example of someone who I think had some awareness of Markel, some basic attraction, some idea that he thought this would be a good home for him and his family and the business that he brought to us. And he has flourished within our system. We're extremely grateful for Frederick's leadership and his accomplishments over the years and just I tell that story just to reinforce the notion that when people are of the same values and have the same culture they do well and they will be given more and more responsibility over time. So Frederick is a great example of that. And then the last function we have within the holding company are what we call the essentials. And basically that means compiling the financial statements, filing the tax return, dealing with matters of compliance, things of that nature so that people like Frederick can run their business and focus on the customers and doing the things that their business needs. And we try to take the burden of administration off their shoulders as much as we possibly can. I'm sorry I was culture, capital, leaders. I was speaking for my slides here without keeping up.
Dr. Lieber had the efficient frontier graph on there and he had a lot of words and his wife perhaps gave him some counsel that that might not have been the best slide. So, I'm going to put up a slide which might be the exact opposite of a slide with a lot of words. This is a slide with no words whatsoever, but it's designed to give you a picture to the best of our ability of the holding company again in those functions that I spoke of that exist at the holding company. And then these diamonds are representing the businesses that we own within the holding company itself. And the largest diamond would be that of our insurance business, which is our legacy business and how all the things started. The other diamonds represent the 21 other businesses that we would own through the Markel Venture structure as well as perhaps some of the companies we own in our publicly traded investment portfolio. And then to continue that path of having the chart with no words but the picture. What is the goal? What is meant to happen over a long period of time? That house, that home for businesses is meant to flourish and grow and be a place where capital can be relentlessly compounded over time. So small picture there to get back to words and fewer words on the slide than Dr. Lieber's slide but I hope this conveys Markel Group is meant to be a home for businesses designed to relentlessly compound your capital over decades. And again to put some numbers on that and the long-term focus that was involved, in 1986 when we went public, the initial public offering was at $8 a share. The total market value of the company at that time would have been a little more than $30 million. Since that time, the market value of the company, and we've only raised equity capital in limited amounts a couple of times over the years, now stands at about $22 billion. So that's where that compounding rate per share, not just the total company, but per share has been at 15% for that time. And it has been decades. And my goal and the goal of Frederick and the goal of everyone in the company is to continue to build upon that record of compounding for long periods of time, which again ties me back to why it is that I'm honored and appreciate the opportunity to speak in front of such a group of long-term investors because I think that your goals and our goals are the same. We're not interested in quarterly fluctuations or quarterly swings. Some of the comments that Dr. Lieber made about the idea of being in a public environment as opposed to a private environment. We actually think there are some profound advantages to being in a public environment and I'll speak to one which on the one hand you might think of this as social but on the other hand it has profound business implications at the same time.
So for instance in 1986 when the company went public and there were three members of the Markel family who were running the company, I was in the investment business at the time and I actually worked for a small investment firm that was part of the syndicate of underwriters to bring the company public. Now in 1984 when I was working in the investment business I read the article in Fortune magazine written by Carol Loomis about Buffett and it was just by accident that that happened. But the light bulb went off for me immediately in terms of understanding and appreciating that structure of taking a specialty insurance operation which is largely what Berkshire was at the time and using the profitability from underwriting profits to invest in equity securities and then control of non-financial, non-insurance businesses. That was exactly the formula that Buffett used to build Berkshire. So in '84 I saw that and started to follow and begin to learn from Buffett and Berkshire. So in 1986 when Markel went public it happened to be in Richmond, Virginia and I saw this small specialty insurance company that had a track record of making underwriting profits and a willingness and this was relatively uncharacteristic then. It's still uncharacteristic today that the insurance company was willing to invest heavily in equity securities as opposed to just fixed income. For a lot of reasons, insurance company portfolios tend to be dominated by fixed income investments. That's true for us as well. And the reason for that is because we need to have the money to pay the claims when they come due and they come due at some point in the future from the point at which we sold the insurance policy. So between the time we sold the policy and the time we pay a claim, we put aside more as Dr. Lieber pointed out with the reserve development triangle, we put aside more than what we think is necessary in a bond fixed income portfolio so that we have the cash to pay the claims when we do so. But the excess over that the equity capital of the company itself has more investment freedom associated with it. And with more investment freedom, you can make more unconstrained choices. And one of the choices that we have made, again learning from the Berkshire example, is to invest heavily in equity securities so that we could get higher returns over longer periods of time. We take some trade-offs in terms of short-term volatility, but over time we've earned higher returns in doing so. And that is the formula by which we have relentlessly compounded the capital and look for the ability to do so.
Well, again, being good students when you first read about Berkshire, you first read about Warren Buffett, but you don't need to be too diligent a student to start learning about Charlie Munger as well. And the two of them together really have formed the intellectual pillars upon which Berkshire is built. And Munger speaks sometimes especially at Berkshire in fewer words but the power per word is pretty high and one of the things that Munger would have said many, many years ago and it really stuck with me it's been repeated it's become identified with Munger as a trademark idea is the idea of invert, always invert. So if you said you wanted to be the best golfer in the world to think of a silly example, well people naturally would go and perhaps take golf lessons or read a book or watch professional golfers and whatnot because they're seeking that positive notion of what do I need to do to be a good golfer? And that's reasonable. Nothing wrong with that. But what Munger would say is all right, what would be the stupidest thing you could do that would destroy your goal of trying to be a good golfer? So working backwards from a negative is that idea that Munger has of inversion. And I think that's a very thoughtful way of approaching any particular challenge or problem that you have. You might think, okay, what are the things I should do to try to positively be better at them over time, but also at the same time on a different track say, what are the things that I shouldn't do or what are the traps that I shouldn't fall into in order to make sure I'm working as effectively as possible to get to the things that are positive. So, if our goal is to relentlessly compound your capital and through the structure and ownership of Markel, create something that compounds over time, what are the things I need to make sure we're not doing? What is most important to avoid in order for those goals to take place? So, we would posit and lay out the notion that look, if a business lacks quality, it's highly unlikely to be successful at compounding over time. If a business lacks diversity, it's highly unlikely to be able to continue to compound over time. If a business does not have financial strength, it can't compound. If a business has too much friction, too much cost, too much inefficiency, it's unlikely to be able to compound effectively over time. And if it doesn't have an idea or a theory or a way to reinvest the money it makes, it can't compound over time. So as examples of quality within the Markel companies itself in our non-insurance businesses four examples of the 21 companies we own. You might not be familiar with these names but these are I often times call them large companies and small industries. So these are market leaders at what they do. Costa Farms if you're a
They are the largest grower of indoor house plants in America. So, if you're buying a plant that you would have in your home, odds are Costa was the company that grew that. They're the leader at that. Lancing Building Products is one of the largest distributors of home products in the country. And I don't know about German homes, but I can tell you American homes rot over time. They are in constant need of maintenance and new this and new that, new siding, new windows, new gutters, etc., etc., etc. Lancing is one of the leading companies that distributes that sort of thing. State National is one of the largest, is the number one company and almost invented the market at fronting, which is a particular area of the insurance world where in essence we would do white label insurance for other brands that wanted to get into the insurance business. We would do the plumbing and piping and regulatory work for people like that. State National, leader at that. Captech is a leading IT consulting firm. It's been recognized, numerous award winners over the years for their skills in helping companies navigate the ever-changing landscape of technology. In the middle there, the big diamond, are insurance operations. Markel is the number four ranked excess and surplus insurance company in the US. We have a global presence as well. Frederick running the European business, but a market-leading company well known at what we do. And within our portfolio of publicly traded companies, again, I think you would find that we tend to gravitate towards number one, the quality, the winners, because those winners compound over time. And names that I'm sure you're familiar with, Visa, doing business all around the world. Home Depot, the leading, again that notion of homes always needing work. Home Depot is the leading company that does that. John Deere, leading agricultural equipment company in the world.
Diversity. In the last five years we've made over $7 billion of operating income and it's a pretty well-diversified stream from which that operating income comes. It's almost equally split between the operating income from this collection of Markel Ventures businesses, our insurance business, and our investment business. And even within those three broad categories, there's pretty good diversity within that. So, Markel Ventures, there's 21 different companies that contributed to that $2.1 billion out of the $7 billion. In our investment operations, those returns you see right there are just the interest from the fixed income and the cash portfolios that make up $2.4 billion. And then the insurance businesses, both the underwriting profits as well as insurance profits, that's $2.7 billion of that $7 billion that we've made. So this is not just a theory. We have indeed made a fair amount of money even in the last five years when the insurance number was a little bit less than what it ideally would have been. We also have an $11 billion public equity security portfolio. So the accretion in value and the earnings from the public equity companies are not included in that total. That's an additional source of diversity and value over time.
Insurance companies, float is a concept that Berkshire talked about and that comes from the fact that you buy insurance today, we collect the premium for that today. We hold the money until such time as we pay it out in the claim and that float in and of itself is something that we earn investment income on and as that grows that increases the earnings and the value per share over time. And for the last three or four years now, we have been repurchasing our own shares. The share count in 2022 peaked out at about 14 million. That's now down to about 12.7 today. So, we've purchased almost 10% of our shares because we thought that was an attractive capital allocation choice at the time.
In terms of financial strength, a couple snippets here. First off, our cash, and this is a measure of conservatism that I think again would resonate with you in the room. Our cash balances right now are higher than the fair value of our debt. So, we have more than enough cash on hand to pay off our debt. We have one piece of debt/preferred stock that comes due next week and we have the cash in hand, that's 600 million bucks that'll be off the balance sheet at that particular point. Our fixed income portfolio, we invest at the very high end of the credit quality spectrum. We are not speculators in the realm of what gets done on the credit side. To your point that you had the efficient frontier, we would be barbell-type investors in many ways and people have different theories about how to invest. Anybody here read Nassim Taleb's stuff, Antifragile or things of that nature? I recommend it as reading and he would be an advocate of the barbell way of thinking. So we think sometimes the middle of that efficient frontier is actually not a good risk-reward trade-off. So we either want, getting to your point about risk, if we don't think we're going to be paid enough to take risk, well, don't take it, which is one end of the barbell. And if we think we are paid well enough to take risk, well, then we'll go to the other end. But we need to have enough of the very low-risk stuff to anchor the balance sheet and to anchor the business in order to be able to take the risk we would take at the other end of the barbell.
And then the picture here, our reserves have been redundant in 20 out of the last 20 years. As Dr. Lieber put up there with our reserve development triangles. If you're going to be a deep student of insurance, again, I would argue that that would be the most important thing to look at in the financial statements because what happens is if you're an insurance company at any given quarter when you're doing your financial reporting and you're speaking about what your earnings are, that in essence is a wrestling match between the income statement of the company and the balance sheet of the company. And you can flatter your income statement and report earnings that might come at the expense of the integrity of your balance sheet. And if you are shorter-term in your mindset, in your way of thinking, there is an epic temptation to do that because typically many things are measured by how much money did you make, how much income did you make. By virtue of the fact that we've had reserve redundancy in 20 out of 20 years, and the table that was put up earlier in Dr. Lieber's presentation that shows you at any given point along the way when we put up our estimate for how much we thought the ultimate amount of losses was going to be, that estimate proved to be conservative. So we were favoring the balance sheet rather than the income statement and that is a fundamental marker of our culture to do it that way.
Again, this speaks to the financial strength that we have, the total returns that have come from the various parts of the business. And we are more than over-capitalized in our ability to operate. Now this slide, and I'm sorry I didn't finish the sentence or the thought about the advantage of being a public company and that story about 1986. So in 1986 when Markel went public, I bought shares of Markel immediately and to some degree I say I appointed myself as a member of the Markel family then even though I'm not Markel by blood or marriage, have no Markel blood or connections in that sense because I became an owner of the business and the public markets facilitate and allow for people to become owners immediately. And our employees are owners through our savings plans and things of that nature. They acquire equity in the company itself. So, public markets facilitate that happening which I think is a keen advantage.
Secondly, it separates the issue of what an employee might want versus what the business needs. So, if the people in a private setting own a business and they need capital, they're going to need to engage in some liquidity transaction which will have spillover effects on the business itself. When you're a public company, if you have a wedding to pay for or a college education or a new house, you can sell a fraction of your ownership interest to deal with those sorts of things. And that is unconnected from the capital needs of the business itself. So, I think there's an argument to be made for why public companies should continue to exist. Many would argue that they shouldn't. And you made the point earlier about the number of public companies going down. That is correct. And I would hope that again you as long-term investors would invest in some public companies and keep it going and there's some very good reasons to do so.
So for instance that's what this slide speaks to. If you look at our cost structure, if you take my salary and the salaries of all the people who run the Markel Ventures operations and the accountants and the lawyers and the compliance people that are involved, the total expense for everything fully loaded to run our portfolio of non-insurance businesses runs to about 40 basis points a year. And I think you will find that is an extraordinarily low cost relative to the cost that might be incurred in many private company structures. Different managers would have different fees. It's not unheard of to have a fee structure of 2 and 20 which would mean 2% of a management fee plus 20% profit participation over a threshold. Compared to that kind of a cost structure, our kind of cost structure creates a lot more pass-through of whatever the economics are of the underlying businesses, you as the shareholders own that without it being lost in friction of the system itself.
Secondly, there's a time element to that. So if you make a commitment to a private equity fund or a private equity thing, generally speaking, there's a commitment that's involved. There's a certain amount of money. The private equity fund does not call it at that instant when you make the commitment. It's called over time as they have deals. But somehow or another, you have to provide for the fact that you need to have the money on hand when the firm calls it. And that creates a time lag of some drag and cost for the dry powder that you have to keep within the Markel system. If you buy a share of Markel stock, the money is invested 100% completely at all times. So there's no time lag there which I think is a helpful fact.
And then third point, there's some tax efficiency. Taxes are very high and an incredible cost. If you look back to 2014 the unrealized gain on our equity portfolio at that time was $2 billion. Through the passage of time and owning some of those good businesses that we spoke of, that unrealized gain is now $8 billion. And what that $8 billion on our balance sheet means is that at a 25% tax rate there's $2 billion which is a deferred tax liability to the government but that $2 billion is still working on your behalf as a Markel shareholder. So I think for individual shareholders in particular or anybody who has concern or pays careful attention to what the tax bills of things are, the idea that we're able to build up gains within the corpus and structure of Markel and not cause you to recognize those immediately, but at your choosing over time is another way in which returns get added to you as a Markel shareholder.
Getting to the point of the reinvestment and the size and scale of our business within insurance, you know as I said we're number four in the US in the excess and surplus world, that's 3% of the market. In London we're 2% of the market. In terms of public equities we remain despite having been successful over years a tiny, tiny company so there's a lot of runway there. We're not running out of things to buy and within Markel Ventures we have 21 companies so plenty of space to continue to add other businesses over time.
As an example, another idea of reinvestment is within Markel itself, within companies we are already in, sometimes there are people who have already proven themselves and shown you that they're very capable and competent managers and they're doing well. When they have ideas to reinvest capital and make their business grow, they're first in line to get capital. This is one slide of an existing facility. If you're in the US and you see seven or eight cars being hauled in a trailer, it's likely us who made that trailer. We're the leading company that does that. We've owned that business for a number of years now. We recently rebuilt it from the ground up with a brand new facility that should put them in good stead to continue to grow and expand their business for many, many years to come.
Systematically. One of the reasons I think we've been skilled at making good reinvestment decisions is we're part of many businesses in our insurance operation. We see so many things. We see risk. We see what happens. We see where people trip up and we see businesses that are growing. So, that's valuable information. In the 21 businesses that we own, we see what's happening in the economy. We see what's happening with orders. We see what's happening in labor markets. That infuses and directs our thinking. Buffett spoke about the idea that they've not been relying on capital markets. So within the investment business and many of you being money managers know that after you've had a hot hand and things have been working well often times you get flooded with money at a time where you may not have the best ideas. And similarly you may get through a tough spot where things don't go well. Clients are withdrawing money. It's just human behavior. And it might be at a time when you yourself have a lot of great ideas and so you'd like inflows. It just works against you.
By virtue of the public company structure and the permanent capital, our flows are generated internally. So we're not relying on people's moods to have money to invest or not. We're also able to change over time and react to the information that we have. We also, again, the culture, the values, we pride ourselves in doing the right things, building great relationships with people over years and decades of doing business such that people are better off for having done business with Markel and that in and of itself leads to other business opportunities over time. So the net result of all that is the idea of the flywheel and just continuing to keep going which is the formula of compounding over and over again.
Again to put numbers on it over time, we went public in 1986, the growth in the share price from $8 to $1,726 at the close of last year would have been about 15%. As I mentioned the last five years and that's a pre-COVID to post-COVID number, 8.6%. Below that we're taking the steps to deal with that and make that better, but 15%. And as was referred to earlier in terms of the number of public companies, when we went public in 1986 there were 7,000 public companies. According to the Chicago Research Center of Securities Prices we would be number 69 of that list of 7,000. So a top 1% company of the 6,999 other choices you could have made at the time and working hard to continue to be in that realm going forward.
Now, one of the reasons the stock prices do what they do, it's not by magic, not by levitation, but by cash flow and the business itself creating value. This is a chart. If you take three years at a time and again trying to embrace longer time frames to get a more accurate view of the trends that are really going on there, this is a view of the operating income of the business three years at a time. So starting 2019, $615 million, up to almost $1.7 billion in the most recent three-year period. So again by looking at three-year buckets at a time I think the trend becomes clear over what happens and what that creates is if you have that operating income that is what really drives the intrinsic value of the business and creates the shareholder returns for you as our shareholders.
As we've said candidly and have talked about and taken the actions, our core insurance business has not reached its potential and to deliver on our promise going forward it indeed must do so. The steps. And so sometimes people wonder, so what kind of insurance do you do at a cocktail party? If somebody asks me about that and ask about Markel, my quick response is if there's a form of insurance that you need and you can get it easily and quickly, we probably don't do that. We do things that are a little harder, a little more complicated. And in three short pictures, for instance, that's a container ship going all around the world. Might be going through the Red Sea, might have people throwing missiles at it. That is not the kind of insurance risk that a vanilla insurance company or a standard insurance company is going to take that kind of risk. We will take that kind of risk. Wind turbines, obviously a well-developed industry, you're ahead of us in Europe and we're coming along, but not only land-based wind turbines, but things that you would float in the seas on floating platforms. We would do things like that. A gas station there. Gas stations oftentimes carry with them environmental risk and environmental exposures that again a standard insurance company would not perhaps be interested in covering. We will do things like that.
And the reason we can do things like that is again because of the expertise that we have within the company and the people that have been in these industries for long periods of times and understand and can price the risks that are involved. So, specialty insurance products, those that are not widely available are what we do. The reason we've been good at it over a long period of time, again, it's because we have the teams of experts who have been long-standing in that business and have the expertise to make it work. And that has created the reputation and the awareness that people call us when they have those kinds of risks. That defines Markel.
Again as I mentioned earlier, we had embraced something of a top-down strategy. We are back to our bottom-up strategy. People are clear that they are responsible for their own P&Ls, their own operations. And they're not trying to be all things to all people. So clarity in the roles of what folks are trying to do. Simplification of our structures to eliminate the matrix sort of things. People who run these businesses have their P&Ls. They're held accountable for them. They know what they need. They know what's worth spending money on, what's not spending money on. And I think we'll continue to do a good job of doing so. And that's empowering the local leaders who run those businesses.
To give you some idea of the people, Simon Wilson has been running our international business. He is now in charge of all of our insurance operations. He has promoted Wendy Howser to run our US excess and surplus lines business. She's a 20-year veteran within Markel and has done extraordinarily well over time. So, she has the responsibility and clarity for the US Excess and Surplus business. Alex Martin runs specialty programs, SH Bermuda for us within the US. Andrew McMullen has succeeded Simon as running the international business. He's worked for Simon for a number of years. Don Barr runs our reinsurance business.
In terms of addressable markets, the E&S business within the US is a growing segment compared to the standard markets. So you can see the growth rates that are there. That's the overall market size and the only point I wanted to convey there was that is a growing market and getting bigger. So and we're the number four player in that market. We ought to have plenty of runway there. Alex, as I mentioned, runs this set of businesses for us. Personal lines, again, we're not a standard company. So, for instance, if you had a yacht that was of some value, not a super yacht, I don't know who Jeff Bezos is getting his insurance from, not us would be my guess. But an older yacht, a wooden boat, things that are specialty craft, we would have a product for that sort of thing as an example. Surety, it's a bonding business that would go with construction and contracts and doing large projects with governments or large commercial builders would be an example. Internationally as said that business has been going extraordinarily well under Simon's leadership and now his deputy Andrew running that, wonderful record of growth and profitability over the years and really getting on the map there.
So what our core belief is is that when we empower these leaders and we have these people who are centurion-grade Romans running their businesses with their P&Ls, the collection of that consortium of those folks do quite well over time. And then the last thing I'll say before I turn it over for a couple of minutes of questions, I know this is an eye chart and you can't read it, so I'll just pull out a couple of key phrases. This was written back in 1986 at about the time of our IPO and it was trying to communicate and let people know who Markel was and so it talked about Markel Service, the first name of the company organized in 1930. So there is some longevity to this business and it's again the 1986 public offering, 50 years later trying to convey that notion that this has been multi-generational. It was the third generation of the family running it by the time you got to 1986.
Centralized management intends to help the company become a separate profit center developing its own identity and reputation. That was the time where the name changed from Markel Service to Markel Corporation because in addition to the underwriting operations at that time we had a claims management business and a brokerage business. So the size and scale and range of operations that the company was involved in started to grow at that time. Markel plans to grow within the insurance industry and service-related fields, foreshadowing the fact of investing in broader things over time. Expertise of personnel will always be more important than the product itself. So it's people and it's the skills and ability and leadership of individual people leading teams that have been the hallmark of this company since the beginning. Employment emphasizes quality rather than quantity. We don't care about how many people we employ. We care about employing the best people.
Ever-changing needs of clients. Innovation will always be a key factor. Increased diversification results in less dependence on any one market segment in a very volatile business. So I just want to emphasize the fact that what we're doing now is nothing new. It's nothing complicated. It is a manifestation of the original vision of the founding of Markel which is meant to be based on taking care of our customers, taking care of each other and in so doing taking care of the capital that is within us and having it compound over time. And again, I just appreciate the opportunity to be in front of a group of German investors who would have the resonance and understanding and historical connection to long-term family-oriented holding companies. And I would be open to any of your questions and we would love for you to be partners in our business. Thank you very much.
