Welcome to The Progressive Corporation Investor Relations conference call. This conference call is also available by an audio webcast. Webcast participants will be able to listen only throughout the duration of the call. In addition, this conference is being recorded at the request of Progressive. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. The company will not make detailed comments in addition to those provided in its quarterly report on Form 10-Q and the letter to shareholders, which have been posted to the company's website, and will use this conference call to respond to questions. Acting as moderator for the call will be Julia Hornack. At this time, I will turn the call over to Ms. Hornack.
Good morning. Welcome to Progressive's conference call. Participating on today's call are Glenn Renwick, our CEO, John Sauerland, our CFO, Tricia Griffith, our Personal Lines Chief Operating Officer, and Bill Cody, our Chief Investment Officer. The call is scheduled to last about an hour. As always, our discussions on this call may include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those discussed during this call. Additional information concerning those risks and uncertainties is available in our 2015 annual report on Form 10-K, where you will find discussions of the risk factors affecting our businesses, safe harbor statements relating to forward-looking statements, and other discussions of the risks, uncertainties, and other challenges we face. These documents can be found via the investors page of our website, progressive.com.
Nicole, we are now ready to take our first question.
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To the extent you have additional questions, you will need to place your name back in the queue by selecting star one on your telephone. Our first question is coming from the line of Josh Stirling from Sanford Bernstein. Your line is now open.
Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Glenn and team, I would love to ask sort of big picture question on growth. You guys have had a really strong probably six months here with growth rates rising. I'm wondering if you can help us a bit disaggregate it because there's a lot of moving pieces. I think the big picture question I'm sort of struggling with is how much is a cyclical story because of the environment, and how much is structural and the impact of the various initiatives.
When I think about it'll be really helpful to get your sort of color on how much you think is this a function of kind of just the competitive environment changing around other folks taking pricing maybe on the first point, you obviously have a lot of retention initiatives underway the second, and then you've got new products, whether it's Snapshot or Homeowners. I imagine these are having some impact and probably more Snapshot than Homeowners at this point. Would love to get it from your perspective as we think about looking forward, how much of this is kind of a cyclical upswing in the growth rates, and how much of this is the impact of big sort of powerful initiatives working their way through?
You did a nice summary of our strategy there. Yeah, you're right. I'm not sure I'm going to get as specific, but think about our October IR meeting as a better opportunity for us to address a lot of those issues. Frankly, some of them are a little bit tricky to put cause and effect to, but growth is actually, boy, sign me up for another first quarter like that one. I know we certainly had some hail at the end, but frankly, we also missed some winter, so no great concerns there on a 94, six or whatever at the kind of growth rates we put together. Nice quarter. Why? Fact is, it's certainly not luck that other competitors take rate. We try to take rate at the right time and make sure we're always positioned. I used the analogy of the wave last time.
We try to ride that crest of the wave. That's sort of the underlying core of everything we do. Forget all the other initiatives. We've got to run the base business exactly the way we want to run it and keep it at a point where we'll always be in a position to take advantage of market conditions when they swing our way. We expect to always grow. That's part of our two-pronged most important statement, 96 and grow as fast as possible. When we get that opportunity that others are perhaps scurrying where we have perhaps got ahead, we'll take those opportunities and welcome them when they come. Second piece is you got to manufacture your own future growth.
The kinds of things with Snapshot, you're more than familiar with the Snapshot representing now almost close to 2 million policies being rated with Snapshot sort of fundamentals. You've seen from the policies that I put in my letter. That's a material part of our book, and you know it's more material on the direct side than on the agency side. We've got some nice initiatives that will continue there with Snapshot. We've talked last time briefly about the app, which we think can also give us an opportunity to reach out to get some other customers that are perhaps not as comfortable with a dongle inside the car. We've announced something with General Motors that will kick off within about 10 days, where we'll be able to actually collect vehicle data with General Motors.
We're starting to, as I've always said, we're starting to worry more about just the data, the algorithms, and the impact on rating, less about the method of collection. Snapshot's got some real gas in the tank, and we'll continue that. Obviously, our brand strength, we continue to push on that, and we've been able to do that in an environment where others have perhaps pulled back just a little bit on their advertising. We're seeing some nice brand strength measures move in the right direction. If you flip over into the agency channel, actually, I'll stay with both for a while. Our product advancements, we've talked primarily about 8.3, but we're always in the hopper for 8.4 or 8.5. We're continuing to develop that.
Probably the biggest move in the agency channel, other than rate competitiveness, is our bundling initiatives that we really have done so nicely with in the direct side. Lots more gas in the tank there, where we use a lot of carriers in the agency side. You know the story on ASI. That is not a big factor in agency growth right now, so I wouldn't overplay that. To the extent that we talk this time next year, I expect that to be a bigger factor in the growth. Growth initiatives are all on track, different stages of maturity. I would put Snapshot higher. We've started to see agent acceptance. I talked about that last time when you asked the question. We started to see the more recent states with agent acceptance, frankly, close to double what they had been previously.
We're starting to see that move in the right direction. Snapshot moving along very well. Platinum in the agency channel really is starting to get a grip, we'll talk about that more in our October meeting. As long as we're very diligent with the pricing, clearly we see and we release numbers for at least you to get a flavor for what's going to happen in April. We're still a few days away, of course, for closing out April and getting you the information 8, 10 business days. We know that's not going to be a great month. We'll take a look at our rating overall. I would say that probably we're still in a mode where we can think in terms of four to five in terms of annualized rate increases, which is a nice place to be.
We gave you some indications on trends. That core should keep rolling, the initiatives are doing well. I didn't answer your question specifically in terms of percentages relative to growth, that is hard to do. We have some feel, but I'm not confident to sort of push that out to a greater audience at this point.
No, that's really helpful, Glenn. Thank you. I wonder if I might ask a bit more of a sort of a numbers question. I think the market has been worried about frequency for a while, I guess it's been a bit more benign. I guess, one, would you characterize this as mostly sort of a letup from sort of favorable weather, which seemed to be sort of implied by your 10-Q and maybe some other competitive commentary? Do you think frequency trends have really peaked now and the industry can now start maybe talking about the possibility of writing severity, which I would love to get your commentary on as well.
Yeah. Always tricky with the variation there, I'm happy to comment on that. In fact, a little piece of the story will be even different than my comments last time around. Frequency is pretty benign, certainly when we look at the BI, which I tend to worry a little bit more about BI frequency than anything else, we're really in pretty good shape there. We're not seeing anything dramatically go away. I would tell you, wait another conference call or two to get too concerned about commentary on PIP. We've got some issues in New Jersey that we think may be driving that number a little bit differently than the true read. I won't say true read, true long term read. Severity really is the play, for the most part, not too much of concern there with bodily injury.
I think the interesting point for severity is really the collision. I think it's a little bit too early to suggest that we clearly put in our 10-Q that frequency was moderated by winter weather this year in the Midwest and the northern states. That's absolutely the case. We also discussed last time that based on our Snapshot measuring, we were not seeing the last quarter of 2015 was overlaying the last quarter of 2014 more on miles driven, vehicles miles driven. That's changed in the first quarter. We're actually seeing an uptick now on vehicle miles driven in the first quarter of 2016 relative to the first quarter of 2015. That's interesting, and that tracks very much with public gasoline demand as well.
While we all speculate on the effect of increased miles, and I've always cautioned that you need to know what kinds of miles, and we are seeing the longer trip miles be the primary driver of that. We may see a little bit of a tick up in frequency, and we certainly need to watch that for what I'll call short to midterm pricing. We may, and please stress that, we may really be seeing a more structural long term change and lower frequency. As we know, cars are getting safer. We've always talked about that. That's very, very hard to sort of measure on a month or even quarterly basis.
It would not be surprising to me to see in the future that we'll see a long term structural decline in frequency and quite possibly, as history has shown us, a similar offset on the severity. Those would be my primary issues there right now, frankly, given that there has never been a time in history there hasn't always been some puts and takes on frequency and severity. This is a reasonably predictable and mild time. The only outlier perhaps is a little bit of PIP severity for us right now, and a little bit of collision severity that we'll take a look at. That, from a pricing perspective, is being offset by frequency.
Great. Thank you, Glenn. Appreciate the comments.
Thank you. The next question is coming from the line of Brian Meredith of UBS. Your line is now open.
Yes, thank you. Glenn, I'm just curious. You've owned ASI for about a year. Obviously some high cat loss activity in March. Sounds like in April there is also. Is it higher than you would've expected? As a result, any thoughts about maybe changing the reinsurance program or something you can do to maybe mitigate some of that volatility?
I'll answer the first question, Brian. No, no thought. That doesn't mean we won't ever have thoughts. We're always going to consider that, but think about the percentage of the overall book of business that we have. We currently have a small quota share percentage. We have a single attachment point of about $45 million for any single event, and we have an aggregate attachment of $175. Those feel very much in proportion to things that we're willing to handle. Do I like volatility? Of course not. No one does. You don't. I don't. Is this sort of in the realm of understanding of what likely could happen when we did something like this? Absolutely. It certainly also plays to the fact that we're writing an awful lot of homeowners, not necessarily with somebody's results that we have to report in now.
The partners that we have, they're all obviously having those problems. It's a different dynamic when we have it in the place that we absolutely need it, as I said in my letter, it hasn't even been a momentary thought to be of any concern whatsoever, there's no pressure from my perspective to take any less reinsurance, equally no more reinsurance.
Great, thanks. Just quickly, on the commercial auto business, the strong growth that you guys have been seeing, some of it I know comes from some new product that you have out there, but I imagine there's also some that's going on from the dislocations that we're seeing out in the marketplace, particularly for some large commercial auto writers. How long do you think that continues for?
You're right in your summary. John, you've had a look at this. I don't have a really strong view because I can't know what the other competitors are doing, do we have any other insight?
Sure. Yeah, we have seen a lot of dislocation, we think we were well ahead of the marketplace, even as much as two to three years ago in seeing some trends that we took some material rate to address and also added some significant underwriting efforts to a lot of the lines we write there to ensure we were writing business that was going to be profitable. We're really well positioned now. Yeah, we are seeing a big increase in quote volume. If you think about new business incoming as either a function of an increase in conversion or quotes and in commercial lines predominantly in quotes, which generally means competitors are raising rates or just not choosing to quote the business. As far as where that goes, we can't know with certainty for sure. We are confident in our rate level.
In some of the areas, we might take rates up a bit, obviously you see combined ratios there that are very good and we expect will continue to be very good. We're pretty bullish on growth moving forward for commercial.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Just a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, you may press star one on your touchtone phone. Our next question is coming from the line of Gary Ransom of Dowling & Partners. You may now ask your question.
Good morning. I noticed you gave some attention to your new relationship with Uber in Texas. It seems like there's a big increase in the potential for the data that you can collect and your understanding of driving behavior. It's not just individual drivers like you're doing with Snapshot, but it's tracking a network. Every one of these drivers has a GPS. You'll have your own app that you can combine with it. I'm just wondering if you could give us a little more color of how much this might change your view or how you can look at driving patterns, driving behavior out there.
Gary, other than to right now, I'm not dodging that question. I'm genuinely not. The fact is your thesis is so on point. Just understand, that's sort of what we're all about. When you get a situation like Uber where you can truly collect the data, there's a wealth of data, whether we incorporate Snapshot or whether we use the data that's otherwise available to us, this is truly an exciting situation because it just plays entirely into everything that we feel we're good at. Hopefully we're playing into one of Josh's comments earlier, just one more thing to have another arrow in the quiver of places to see growth coming later. There's not a lot to report right now, and I'm simply not dodging your question. The idea that this is just an insurance program, it's much more than that.
That's why I used the analogy of the square peg, round hole, and I think we've really developed a program that makes a lot of sense. Hopefully the way this is really successful is that we know what that vehicle's doing, where it's going, sort of route intensity, braking intensity, all sorts of things that we can know not only at the fleet level, but we can know it at the driver level as well. Frankly, this is one that if I was in person, you'd see me smiling because I think this is sort of one of those opportunities that comes along relatively infrequently, and this just seemed like it had our name written all over it.
My imagination may not be enough to see other opportunities of a similar nature. Are there other opportunities out there where you can gather more informative data like that?
Yeah. I think you've got to accept strategically that is the mindset you've got to have. You can take it all away from the private passenger automobile, which we're doing slowly with Snapshot, but you'll see taxi cabs being sort of more involved in this type of thing. There was a release today in The Wall Street Journal about GM working with Lyft. We have a relationship with Lyft. There's a lot more vehicle sharing. It's a minute part of the economy right now, but certainly one that if you were a betting person, you'd probably bet on seeing that being a lot bigger later. We want to make sure that we're designing contemporary style insurance programs for those kinds of options. Frankly, I think we're extremely well suited for it.
We know others will have some interest, but we're doing an awful lot of groundwork right now. We're very happy with that. I think this is going to be something we're going to be talking about a lot more in the years to come.
Well, thank you, Glenn, for that color.
Just a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, you may press star one on your touchtone phone. Our next question is coming from the line of Meyer Shields of KBW. Your line is now open.
Thanks. Good morning. Glenn, you mentioned, I think in response to Josh, that you expect increases in severity to offset the frequency decreases that you can anticipate from improving cars. That kind of surprised me because I guess I wouldn't have necessarily seen the historical connection persist. I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about that.
Well, we've actually shown in at least one IR meeting, I'm not quite sure whether it was two or three years ago, sort of what I would call, if not a perfect monotonic function over some reasonable period of time, a declining frequency. The fact is we've made our cars safer in this country for the last 30 years, there's nothing on the immediate horizon that suggests that we're not going to make them continuously safer. Some of the things, even the federal mandate for emergency braking, those sorts of things, it's impossible for me to think there isn't a real macro driver to yet make cars safer. That's my premise for declining frequency.
What's interesting is that over that time period, the market for private passenger auto has grown, that is largely a severity offset to the-- actually, it's even more than an offset, it's a gain, over the frequency decline. Those are interesting and accurate and observable facts. When you start to decompose it to try to sort of say exactly coverage by coverage, what's driving it, that gets a little trickier. I'm working, at least my mindset, is that a long-term strategic view is that we will see fewer accidents and more expensive accidents.
Okay, that's fair enough. Then second, sort of a detailed question. The jump in the commercial auto expense ratio in March, is it fair to tie that to the new Uber relationship?
No, I wouldn't tie that. There might be a penny or two there for sure, but actually there's probably two bigger drivers of that. We are working to put a great new system in for commercial, so there's some expense associated with that, but mostly it's driven by advertising costs as we continue to grow our penetration or our attraction for our direct operation. That landscape is in small business people who have needs that are not that dissimilar to private passenger auto and choose to operate or interact with us on a direct basis. We're building that out and that definitely seems like the demand is there, so we're doing more advertising to support that.
All right.
That'll be the biggest driver of the expense difference.
Okay, that sounds like it'll continue based on your comments on the environment.
Yeah. It'll be a little spiky from time to time based on seasonality, but yeah, expect that, but that doesn't mean there won't be some equal and opposite offsets as we build that retention book in direct. A lot of it is front ended.
Okay, perfect. Thanks so much.
Just a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, you may press star one on your touchtone phone. The next question is coming from Ian Gutterman of Balyasny. Your line is now open.
Hi. Thank you. Glenn, I just want to follow up real quick on the frequency comments in the 10-Q sounding a little bit better. Then your comments earlier about miles driven being up, which we can all see. Usually those two seem to correlate a little bit more. It seems maybe they went in opposite directions this quarter. Any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I'd be careful to make a quarter to quarter comparison there. Let's take a look together at sort of next quarter or even next 6 months to see how the frequency is ultimately being reflected through. It should be a pretty close comparison, but I'm not always convinced that it gets 1 for 1. I'd wait just a quarter and see.
Got it. Okay, great. Then a couple things on the homeowners. One is just can you just tell us a little bit about how your reinsurance is structured? I guess where I'm getting at is I'm guessing because a lot of others have done this, you probably have some aggregate cover. Just given the March events and the April events, sort of how do you stand with that aggregate cover? What's the risk of essentially going through that if we have more events later in the year, especially a hurricane? Do you need to sort of buy live cover for the rest of the year? Then just big picture on your home, just from what I can see in market share, obviously your 2 biggest states are Florida and Texas, which are heavy cat states.
As you roll out the Platinum, is it a specific goal to grow away from cat areas, or is it sort of take it where you can get it if it's a good customer, and you'll sort out the cat mix later?
We try not to do things later. We try to think about them ahead of time. The fact is, Florida and Texas, that's where people live. We're going to be active there, and we're comfortable with it. The reinsurance that ASI has put together right from the beginning is obviously in a position to respect the fact that they have coastal exposure. Why don't you go through, John, the sort of the three layers. We're a long way from sort of overly any concerns that Ian has there, but why don't we at least talk about the $45 single event and the $175 bond, and Trevor is right here, so if we need additional help, we can get that.
Obviously we gave you some insights into ASI's reinsurance program in the 10-Q.
Right.
Glenn really just covered them. The first layer is $45 million. The tower on the first event, we won't start quoting PMLs, but trust me, that is much higher than I would expect the average industry buys to. Going through the top, so to speak, is a highly unlikely event. Yes, we then have a catastrophe bond facility that is at an aggregate of $175 million, and that is for storms throughout a calendar period. We are covered on second events similarly, not quite as high a tower, but we also pre-purchase reinstatement on many of the layers. Not completely up the tower, but unlike many other players, if we ever had to reinstate, those premiums are prepaid for much of the reinsurance. ASI has an extremely robust reinsurance program. All of the players in that program are virtually all are A-rated or better.
We are very comfortable with the program. That 45, they had targeted previously that retention to ensure that at any one event, less than 10% of their surplus was at risk. Honestly, less than 10% of their surplus is a pretty small percentage of the combined entities. A pretty robust reinsurance program. Trevor, I don't know if you want to add anything to that.
No, I think you nailed it pretty well.
No, that's great. Very helpful. If I could just clarify, Glenn, on the Platinum part again. Is there any restrictions at all? Do you say we'd rather not grow Houston if we're going to grow Texas, or we'd rather not grow Miami if we're going to grow Florida and maybe just market it more aggressively in the Midwest or the Northeast or other places where you have a little bit less cat risk?
ASI has historically sort of controlled the risk to a significant degree in Florida, only taking the amount of business they felt comfortable with. We're very conscious of the concentration layers. As we roll out the rest of the country, obviously that will become less dependent on any one state. There's a yes and a no answer in there. The yes, because of where we are today, but ultimately we want to be a meaningful bundled option for consumers, Florida's a big state. We will, as you just heard, make sure that we have all the right reinsurance. We're not going to go crazy. We know our objective here is to try to get customers and have them with us for a long period of time.
If we are more than comfortable letting someone take the layers above that, hopefully they'll make profits on that over a reasonable period of time because we'll achieve our objectives as well. Don't assume that somehow we're going to only be marketing this in the sort of interior states or something like that. We're going to be as aggressive in states as we can be. Hopefully you would agree we will be very thoughtful about that and have the right level of risk sharing. That doesn't mean, and this is probably interesting, that we sort of got the layers that we have, we've got the results that we have. This may be sort of the pain point right now in terms of absorbing the results. The real question is: how do we feel about that volatility?
I wish it wasn't the case per se, but I think we're getting a sense of exactly what that volatility can mean to us. My only encouragement, it's just my encouragement, is given that we're a monthly reporter, you're going to see that volatility just be a little bit more dramatic than you would over longer periods of time.
Very much-
There isn't an ounce of us rethinking strategy or doing anything differently at this point. I shouldn't make it flippant in that case. Doesn't mean we haven't thought a great deal about it. We're just coming back and confirming the positions that we have.
Perfect.
ASI did enter California in January, I believe we started writing business, February. We expect to be in New York mid-year, May. Sort of naturally as they expand across the country, you'll see less concentration in those coastal states. To date, yes, they've been pretty highly concentrated in the Southeast. I think naturally as they enter more states where there's a large populace as well, you'll see that concentration decrease.
Understood. Thanks for the help.
Thank you. The next question is coming from the line of Mark Dwelle of RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.
Yeah, good morning. Just wanted to get a little bit more information on the cat losses that you've already reported for the second quarter. Were those primarily concentrated in the Texas market, or was it a little bit more geographically dispersed than that?
Jump in, guys. I think Texas is the big driver. You probably, even if you watch television, you'll see that Oklahoma's got something. There's a little in Kansas. The real driver is Texas.
Was that more skewed towards the flood losses in Houston or the hail losses in San Antonio?
Well, let's break our two lines apart. Frankly, well, it's the same real issue. Hail and driving weather really have been the cause for both auto and home. Home's not really affected by the flood conditions in Houston. Some of our vehicles are, although that actually was a relatively manageable number. My memory tells me about 450 losses directly related to the flood, that's not a big driver of our results this month. When you see that 135, the 85/50 split, think about the really nasty peril of hail. When hail gets to be the size that it is, it is warfare out there for roofs and for sheet metal, and there's a lot of damage. That's just plain and simple. Hail is one of the most nasty perils that we come into. Comp is going to be dramatically affected by that.
As I said, we will take a couple of opportunities, even though the numbers will be what they are. The first thing that we'll do is recognize that these are first-party claims. We're going to pay the loss, we've got to turn that into a marketing expense. This is the time that we get with our customers and make their lives better after an upset, whether it's their roof or whether it's their windshield or whatever. The first thing, the attitude we're taking right now is turn that into a marketing expense. We know how important retention is. We know the relationship when you give great service and claims and the future retention. That's the first thing. Second is take a look at our pricing, make sure that we're where we want to be. Certainly, one spike of a month, we've seen that on numerous occasions.
We're not at all concerned that we are off track for our commitment to shareholders, our 96 or better. We will reevaluate our cat loads, and I would tell you if I was looking at the overall market, I see a rate change in an overall basis or at least driven by big competitors. Last data point we have, February, around about a 4.5, which is about 110 basis points stronger than earlier in the year. My suspicion, based on knowing what's being filed, we will get more clarity on that from competitors for April and May, we know there's been a lot of rate changes filed, you could see that go a little higher. I would say if I was giving you direction last call, I probably would've said think in the 4 range.
Think about a point per quarter if you average it out. I'd say put another 25 to 40 basis points on that per quarter as we look at the rest of the year, and we might be a little higher when you factor in cat loads. For the most part, I think this is all quite manageable for us.
That's really helpful. Thank you. One last kind of nerd question. When events like these happen, do those tally into frequency and severity statistics, or is that a different calculation for cat events like these?
They're mostly comp, at least on the vehicle side. Typically, when we give you numbers for frequency and severity, we don't put comp in there because that'd just be a random walk in terms of your graph. Most of the frequency and severity numbers we give you are the more sustainable coverages like BI, UMBI, PD. Certainly, as we look at it, yes, it factors in.
Right. Got it. Thank you very much.
Just a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, you may press star one on your touchtone phone. Our next question is coming from Robert Glasspiegel of Janney Montgomery Scott. Your line is now open.
Good morning, Progressive. Glenn, I'm going to push back a little bit on your sort of slight warning about miles driven potentially having an impact on frequency. Gas prices are up 30% from sort of roughly the average level of where they were in the quarter, and we're going to soon be sort of lapping year-over-year impact of gas prices. If lower gas prices hasn't really driven a big impact on frequency to your book to date, why just in the future should we be incrementally more nervous about it?
Well, I'm going to probably repeat myself here a little bit. The last quarter we had our 2015 fourth quarter wasn't that much different than 2014 fourth quarter. As we start this first quarter of 2016, we're starting to see that be considerably above. That tracks with gasoline demand. That all makes reasonable sense. The question is, how high will it go? Well, people aren't going to drive infinite miles just because gas is cheaper, they're not going to drive to work more often. This is more recreational and discretionary type trips. Frankly, I think everybody can have a theory on that. I would just tell you that what has changed is in the first quarter, we are seeing miles driven as our Snapshot population, which is large enough to be credible.
I'd make the claim that it is different than the claim I made for the fourth quarter where we hadn't seen it be dramatic. In fact, it had flattened off. It is now showing increase, and we're going into what is really the high vehicle mile traveled part of the year. It'll be interesting to see whether or not the discretionary usage continues to be higher or not. In this one, Bob, I think all I can do is report the news. We have incredible interest in this sort of thing because it makes a big difference. Whether I could say that we're seeing a dramatic change in frequency simply because of that, no. We take it as it comes, and there's indications that because those miles are more discretionary and longer distance trips, that the effect on frequency is not quite as linear as you might expect.
Totally with you. I guess I was asking more a futuristic question that the data that you were looking at is when gas prices were down a whole lot year-over-year, and we've had a 30% spike in gas prices.
Yes.
I'm just saying, if you were looking at real time data the last few weeks, I would think that you're not going to see the same year-over-year mileage increases that we saw in the first quarter, where gas prices were down a whole lot versus a year ago.
I wouldn't bet against you on that one. I don't have the April numbers. Actually, as soon as I get off this call I'm actually probably going to get more of the April numbers, because that'll be very interesting. Yeah.
I would add, while we can't model it perfectly, we think gas prices, there's some step functions in there. Certainly back when we hit $4, that was a ceiling that people retracted it a lot. We think in some reasonable range, some of the marginal change in driving is not that linear with gas prices.
Yeah. Certainly economic and trucks on the road. This is a very complicated, trucks versus trains, can obviously impact it a lot.
Airline travel, too.
Right.
Discretionary travel. Yeah.
Right. Switching gears.
Unfortunately, we report the news more here, but we have our own theories, but I don't dismiss or suggest that yours is not an interesting one as well. April will tell a story because we're really going into April and May and June, which are the high travel vehicle miles traveled months.
Right. It looks like you lengthened your maturities a little bit in the first quarter, took your short-term down. Anything material behind that, and anything on the investment side that we should be aware of that you're doing?
Bill, do you want to jump in on that?
Sure, Bob. Yeah. Actually, we shortened the duration of the portfolio a little bit in the first quarter as rates fell. The short-term change or the big increase in short term in the first quarter is really not so much a portfolio strategy change as it is a definitional change. What I tried to get to in the Q is we had about $1.1 billion of short coupon treasuries that counted in our treasury portfolio that matured in the first quarter, and we rolled those into treasury bills, which are counted in the short-term portfolio. No real big change there other than a tenth of a year decline in the duration of the portfolio. The other changes that we had was we increased our corporates a little bit in the first quarter as we saw some more compelling opportunities when spreads were wider.
We've made some little repositioning around the ARX portfolio where we took control of the management of that portfolio on January 1st. There've been some turnover in regard to that. Other than that, no material changes in the portfolio, and certainly no changes in our overall strategy there.
Thank you.
It would appear that that was our last question, so that concludes our call today. Nicole, I will turn it back over to you for the closing script.
Thank you. That concludes The Progressive Corporation's Investor Relations conference call. An instant replay of the call will be available through Friday, May 20, by calling 1-800-253-1052 or can be accessed via the investor relations section of Progressive's website for the next year.