Topic: How To Invest

Q: Dear Pat: Thank you for all the great advice over the years. I’d really appreciate your opinion of Verisk (VRSK) on Nasdaq. Thank you.

Article Excerpt

A: Verisk Analytics, $122.12, symbol VRSK on Nasdaq (Shares outstanding: 164.7 million; Market cap: $19.9 billion; www.verisk.com), offers risk-assessment services for property/casualty insurers and other businesses. Its decision-analytics technology helps clients understand and manage risks through fraud detection and prevention. In addition to property/casualty insurers, the company serves the financial services and energy industries. Verisk’s customers include all of the top 100 property and casualty, or P&C, insurance providers in the U.S. In addition, it serves all of the top 30 credit-card issuers in North America, the U.K. and Australia. Clients also include 9 of the top 10 global energy providers and a wide range of governments across the globe. For its P&C clients, the company focuses on helping them price their policies. To do that, each year, those firms send Verisk about 3.8 billion detailed individual records of insurance transactions. That includes data on insurance premiums collected and losses incurred. The company maintains a database of more than 21.0 billion statistical…