Comparing Fidelis Insurance (NYSE:PLGO) and Slide Insurance (NASDAQ:SLDE)

Slide Insurance (NASDAQ:SLDE) and Fidelis Insurance (NYSE:PLGO) are both financial services companies, but which is the better business? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their earnings, institutional ownership, dividends, analyst recommendations, profitability, valuation and risk.

Profitability

This table compares Slide Insurance and Fidelis Insurance’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Slide Insurance	38.86%	48.38%	17.38%
Fidelis Insurance	15.33%	14.44%	2.63%

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Slide Insurance and Fidelis Insurance”s top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Slide Insurance	$1.16 billion	1.77	$443.96 million	$3.60	4.95
Fidelis Insurance	$2.50 billion	0.75	$225.50 million	$3.74	5.83

Slide Insurance has higher earnings, but lower revenue than Fidelis Insurance. Slide Insurance is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Fidelis Insurance, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Analyst Ratings

This is a summary of recent recommendations and price targets for Slide Insurance and Fidelis Insurance, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Slide Insurance	0	2	6	1	2.89
Fidelis Insurance	1	1	2	1	2.60

Slide Insurance presently has a consensus price target of $24.80, suggesting a potential upside of 39.09%. Fidelis Insurance has a consensus price target of $24.33, suggesting a potential upside of 11.57%. Given Slide Insurance’s stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, equities research analysts clearly believe Slide Insurance is more favorable than Fidelis Insurance.

Institutional & Insider Ownership

82.0% of Fidelis Insurance shares are owned by institutional investors. 50.8% of Slide Insurance shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, large money managers and endowments believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Summary

Slide Insurance beats Fidelis Insurance on 9 of the 13 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Slide Insurance

Launched in 2021, we are a technology enabled, fast-growing, coastal specialty insurer. We focus on profitable underwriting of single family and condominium policies in the property and casualty (“P&C”) industry in coastal states along the Atlantic seaboard through our insurance subsidiary, Slide Insurance Company (“SIC”). We utilize our differentiated technology and data-driven approach to focus on market opportunities that are underserved by other insurance companies. We acquire policies both from inorganic block acquisitions and subsequent renewals, as well as new business sales through a combination of independent agents and our direct-to-consumer(“DTC”) channel, through which we sell our insurance products directly to end consumers, without the use of retailers, brokers, agents or other intermediaries. We do not depend on any one key product or product line within the coastal specialty homeowners insurance market. We control all aspects of our value chain, including technology, underwriting, actuarial, distribution, claims and risk management which allows us to maximize profitability while maintaining disciplined underwriting standards. Our goal is to deliver long-term value for stockholders by focusing on underserved, coastal specialty markets where market capacity is limited and demand for insurance products is high. Coastal specialty market demand for insurance products has increased over the last few years as the larger, national insurance carriers have reduced their underwriting capacity in such markets which has created a unique market opportunity for us to capitalize on the imbalance of supply and demand. A prime example of this market shift is Florida, where large national carriers have reduced their market share of premium from 62% in 1999 to 28% in 2022, creating an opportunity for accretive expansion. We have built a highly entrepreneurial company that we believe can identify and execute on such opportunities faster and more profitably than our competitors. We believe we have a significant technological advantage that allows us to assess, manage and price risk for individual and bulk policy acquisitions. Our technology is built to estimate future costs of policies and compare it back to our base rates to better understand profitability in real time on an individual risk basis and to assess large and/or bulk transactions. This technology permits us to only select policies that we believe to be profitable based on future reinsurance and all other perils (“AOP”) costs. Our underwriting technology has been an important component of our success and is backed by our proprietary $6 trillion total insured value (“TIV”) underwriting and claims dataset, which provides us with real-time intelligence to drive superior decision making. We believe that traditional markets inefficiently and inaccurately underwrite coastal specialty risks without properly understanding prospective loss ratios and reinsurance costs. We believe other insurance companies do not have the same ability to assess these metrics in real time and their technology limits their ability to consistently select profitable policies. We believe our underwriting technology allows us to more accurately assess the future cost of each policy, which enables us to focus on profitable growth opportunities often overlooked or mispriced by our competitors. We believe our proprietary technology combined with our highly experienced and entrepreneurial leadership team allow us to make better underwriting decisions that generate higher margins for our business. We market and write insurance policies through two channels: our independent agents and DTC. As we continue to scale our operations, we anticipate that our DTC distribution will grow as well through our focus on accretive market opportunities. We have significantly grown our business and scaled it profitably in our targeted coastal specialty markets by leveraging our seasoned management team, technology and strong balance sheet. We have grown our shareholders’ equity from $102 million at the end of 2021 to $433 million at the end of 2024, a compound annual growth rate (“CAGR”) of 62%. In this same time period, we have grown from $0 of in force premium to $1,334 million at the end of 2024, while running an average consolidated combined ratio of 80.3%. Our return on equity and combined ratio were 46.9% and 79.0% for 2023, and 60.0% and 72.3% for 2024, respectively. For the three months ended March 31, 2024 and March 31, 2025, we had gross premiums written of $245 million and $278 million, policy fees of $1 million and $2 million, consolidated combined ratio of 66.7% and 58.9% and net income of $55 million and $93 million, respectively. As of March 31, 2025, we had total assets of $1.9 billion, shareholders’ equity of approximately $532 million and tangible shareholders’ equity of approximately $524 million. For the three months ended March 31, 2025, we had a return on equity of 19.2% and a return on tangible equity of 19.5%. For the years ended December 31, 2023 and December 31, 2024, we had gross premiums written of $875 million and $1,334 million, policy fees of $3 million and $7 million, consolidated combined ratio of 79.0% and 72.3% and net income of $87 million and $201 million respectively. As of December 31, 2024, we had total assets of $1.9 billion, shareholders’ equity of approximately $433 million and tangible shareholders’ equity of approximately $423 million. For the year ended December 31, 2024, we had a return on equity of 60.0% and a return on tangible equity of 62.6%. Our principal executive offices are located in Tampa, Florida.

About Fidelis Insurance

Fidelis is a leading global provider of bespoke and specialty insurance and reinsurance products. We believe our differentiated underwriting positions us well to generate strong returns across (re)insurance cycles. Current Fidelis is led by Mr. Daniel Burrows who has more than 35 years of experience in the insurance industry and is supported by a highly experienced management team that manages the operations of Current Fidelis based on our founding principles. Following the Separation Transactions, Current Fidelis is positioned as a global, specialty insurance provider with exclusive right of first access to Fidelis MGU’s underwriting business during the term of the Framework Agreement. Based on Fidelis’ historical experience, we expect this long-term partnership to deliver strong returns to our shareholders, primarily driven by our underwriting results. We aim to be good stewards of capital by effectively balancing capital deployment across market opportunities with capital distributions to our shareholders. We will continue to benefit from decades of thought and process leadership and innovation through our strategic relationship with Fidelis MGU. The management team of Fidelis MGU, led by Mr. Brindle, has a robust track record built across multiple platforms. Mr. Brindle has more than 38 years of underwriting leadership, including founding Lancashire Holdings Limited (“Lancashire”) and holding leading roles at Syndicates 488 and 2488 at Lloyd’s of London (“Lloyd’s”). Teams led by Mr. Brindle oversaw Lancashire stock price appreciation of 412.0% from December 16, 2005 (the date of Lancashire’s initial public offering) to December 31, 2013 (immediately prior to his retirement from Lancashire), significantly exceeding the 71.0% price appreciation from a group of Lancashire’s publicly traded insurance company peers for the period (including Ace, XL, Arch, Everest, PartnerRe, Axis, Allied World, RenaissanceRe, Validus, Montpelier, Greenlight Re, Third Point Re, Hiscox, Amlin, Catlin, Beazley and Novae). Past performance of Lancashire is no guarantee of future results for Fidelis. Mr. Brindle and his team also outperformed at Lloyd’s by delivering a 17.5% return on a straight average for Syndicates 488 and 2488 during his time there from 1986 to 1998, compared to Lloyd’s average return of 0.9% over the same period. Past performance of Syndicates 488 and 2488 is no guarantee of future results for Fidelis. Further, while at Fidelis, between 2017 and 2022 Mr. Brindle and his management team achieved strong, consistent underwriting performance with an average loss ratio of 45.3%, an average combined ratio of 85.8% and an average standard deviation of combined ratio of 6.5% compared with the peer average of 64.3% and 99.5% and 8.1%, respectively. Over this same period, Fidelis’ average loss ratios for each of its Specialty, Bespoke and Reinsurance pillars was 42.8%, 26.7% and 64.9%, respectively, compared to its peers’ average loss ratios of 61.4%, 61.4% and 72.1%, respectively. Fidelis’ combined ratio was 86.0%, 76.3%, 86.6%, 80.6%, 92.9% and 92.1% in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively, compared to a peer average combined ratio of 109.4%, 96.9%, 96.7%, 103.7%, 96.6% and 93.5% in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively. In the three months ended March 31, 2023, our loss ratio was 41.3% and combined ratio was 79.1% compared with a peer average of 59.3% and 90.5%, respectively. Fidelis’ peer group includes Arch, Argo, Aspen, Markel, W. R. Berkley, Hiscox, Beazley, Lancashire, Everest Re, Axis Capital and RenaissanceRe (except for the three months ended March 31, 2023 which excludes Aspen, Hiscox, Beazley and Lancashire as the information is not available for this period). In each case, prior underwriting and combined ratio performance is no guarantee of future performance. Each of the Fidelis and financial peer combined ratios is calculated as the sum of losses and loss adjustment expenses, policy acquisition expenses and general and administrative expenses as a percentage of NPE in all periods except 2018. In 2018, the Fidelis combined ratio included a negative $2.1 million adjustment to NPE as a result of the costs to acquire a derivative instrument to protect against Typhoon Jebi losses and a $10 million positive adjustment to investment returns recognized on the derivative. Financial peer combined ratios were calculated as the average of the reported combined ratios of each company. We will continue to focus on nimble underwriting designed to capitalize on current market trends and dislocations as well as emerging risk solutions. We expect to maintain at a minimum the existing underwriting standards and where appropriate will look for enhancements. The team of underwriters at Fidelis MGU continues to maintain the robust processes and use of technology that have been key to Fidelis’ historical success at ensuring its underwriting efforts capture recent market developments. We believe this close coordination reduces the likelihood of siloed underwriting and gives us a competitive advantage in our underwriting, risk assessment and ability to offer as many products as possible to clients. A crucial and distinguishing part of those robust processes is daily Underwriting and Marketing Conference Calls (the “UMCC”) with practice leads and key members of senior management (including risk modeling, actuarial, legal, compliance, contract wordings and claims epresentatives) to provide live market insights and multiple perspectives to allow underwriters to quickly assess emerging opportunities, achieve strong underwriting and cross-sell across our product range. Since we began underwriting business in 2015, Fidelis has reached an attractive scale in bespoke and specialty insurance and property reinsurance markets while delivering robust results. Our GPW grew from $0.5 billion for the year ended December 31, 2017 to $3.0 billion for the year ended December 31, 2022, a compound annual growth rate of 40.6%, while delivering an average loss ratio of 45.3% and an average combined ratio of 85.8%. Over the same period, our NPE grew from $0.2 billion for the year ended December 31, 2017 to $1.5 billion for the year ended December 31, 2022, a compound annual growth rate of 47.0%. Our GPW continued to grow to $1.2 billion for the three months ended March 31, 2023 compared to $1.0 billion for the three months ended March 31, 2022. Our loss ratio and combined ratio for the three months ended March 31, 2023 were 41.3% and 79.1%, respectively. In addition to earnings growth from the origination of new business, we believe that there is significant embedded earnings potential in previously written business due to the requirements of applicable accounting rules that revenue from written premiums must be recognized when earned over the life of a policy. This is reflected in our gross UPR balance of $3.3 billion at March 31, 2023. Our scale and access to the highly selective underwriting capabilities of Fidelis MGU via our strategic relationship will allow us to capitalize on current insurance market trends and continue focusing on delivering growth coupled with strong underwriting results. Fidelis is subject to varying degrees of regulation and supervision in the jurisdictions in which it operates. In particular, the businesses of our three insurance operating subsidiaries, FIBL, FUL and FIID, are authorized by, and subject to insurance laws and regulations that are administered and enforced by, a number of different governmental and non-governmental self-regulatory authorities and associations in each of their respective jurisdictions and internationally. Our registered office is at Waterloo House, 100 Pitts Bay Road, Pembroke, Bermuda.