Manatee Research is short shares of Slide Insurance Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:SLDE).
Business:
- Slide is a $1.9 billion property and casualty insurer based in Tampa, Florida. The company mainly writes single family homeowners’ insurance in coastal areas of Florida. It was founded in 2021 by husband-wife duo Bruce and Shannon Lucas, who serve as CEO and COO, respectively.
Management Red Flags:
- A Florida statute prohibits executives responsible for failed insurers from taking on new leadership roles at other insurance companies.
- Slide‘s CFO, SVP of Operations and SVP of Claims formerly worked for failed insurer St. Johns Insurance prior to joining Slide.
- In March 2024, Florida’s insurance regulator sent letters instructing Slide to remove these three executives unless they could prove they were not contributing causes of St. Johns’ insolvency, based on documents we obtained via the Florida Public Records Act and media reports.
- Information obtained via our request indicated that Slide was still under investigation as of August 2025.
- Internet archives show that rather than remove these executives, Slide removed mention of St. Johns from its SVP of Operations’ biography and removed its SVP of Claims from its website entirely, though both executives continue to list Slide as their employer on LinkedIn.
Juicing Margins Via Claim Delays And Denials:
- Slide’s reported underwriting margins were over 22 percentage points better than those of publicly listed peers in 2024. The company has attributed this outperformance to a “superior underwriting model,” and sell side analysts believe that Slide’s proprietary technology will drive meaningful growth.
- We think Slide’s technology claims are significantly overstated. Slide’s own SVP of Data Analytics attributed a 7-point loss ratio improvement to a third-party vendor, a tool that appears to be available to competitors. Our checks also found irregularities with Slide’s key technical executives.
- We believe that claim delays and claim denials account for a significant portion of Slide’s underwriting outperformance, per data retrieved from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and Florida’s Department of Financial Services.
- We found over a thousand civil remedy notices aimed at Slide. Many alleged bad faith claims handling, including delaying property inspections, claiming significant damages fall below policy deductibles, and failing to adjust claim awards despite having sufficient information on damages.
- As thousands of homeowner complaints piled in, Slide’s husband-wife duo received $35.6 million in salary and bonuses in 2023 and 2024 alone.
Overearning:
- Slide’s bull case rests on its “tech-enabled” superior underwriting model driving durable, industry-leading margins and growth. The company went public in June 2025 and is now trading at a ~12% discount to its IPO price as if this writing, with some analysts calling the stock “cheap” given the company’s growth profile.
- Slide’s policy growth over the last four years was driven by acquiring inherently risky policies from defunct insurance companies and the state’s “insurer of last resort,” Citizens Property Insurance. With few insurers willing to take on these risky policies, Slide was able to acquire many at low to no cost, boosting short term financial metrics.
- Slide’s policy book is heavily weighted toward older homes, with ~69% of its total insured value on structures built before 2001, per its S-1 filing. Compounding this risk, ~35% of its total insured value is concentrated in Florida’s four most vulnerable counties to hurricanes, per Slide’s prospectus and FEMA’s National Risk Index.
- Citizens is rapidly running out of policies for Slide to acquire. Without this growth channel, Slide’s policy acquisition costs are set to increase dramatically.
More Red Flags:
- Slide does not have a rating from a large agency like AM Best. Instead, it boasts an “‘A’ Exceptional” rating from Demotech, which it told investors provided an “objective baseline” for assessing its solvency.
- Demotech is a tiny rating agency based in Dublin, Ohio, with just 18 employees and 5 analysts covering 450 companies, per a July 2025 WSJ investigation. A 2024 Harvard study found that 19% of Florida insurers rated by Demotech entered rehabilitation proceedings in the past decade, while none by traditional rating agencies did. The 2025 WSJ analysis found that Demotech-rated insurers were 30 times as likely to become insolvent than those graded by main rivals.
- Slide is audited by Forvis Mazars, an unusually small auditor for a company of Slide’s market capitalization. In Forvis’s 2024 inspection report, the PCAOB found deficiencies in 10 out of 14 audits, with some relating specifically to insurance reserves and unearned premiums.
- Slide’s management team and insiders have not waited to take chips off the table. Its CEO and his wife have taken $35.6 million in salary and bonuses over the last 2 years and early investors sold $124.1 million into the IPO.
Conclusion:
- We believe that instead of a fast-growing technology company with superior underwriting, Slide has simply been vacuuming up inordinate amounts of policy risk. With cheap policy sources becoming depleted, Florida regulators circling key executives and insiders selling, we think Slide is a disaster waiting to happen.
Initial Disclosure: After extensive research, we have taken a short position in shares of Slide Insurance (NASDAQ: SLDE). This report represents our opinion, and we encourage every reader to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report.
Background: $1.9 Billion Florida Property And Casualty Insurer Founded In 2021
Slide Insurance is a tech-enabled property and casualty insurer based in Tampa, Florida. Through its wholly owned Slide Insurance Company (“SIC”), the company writes homeowners insurance policies 99% concentrated in Florida.
Slide was founded in 2021 by husband-wife duo Bruce and Shannon Lucas, who serve as the company’s CEO and COO, respectively.
Slide has grown rapidly over the past four years. From 2023 to 2024 alone, Slide’s gross premiums written grew 52% to $1.33 billion, and its policies in force increased 62% to 343,056.
As of December 31, 2024, 74% of Slide’s policies were concentrated in counties bordering the Atlantic Ocean. Slide described the area as an opportunity “often ignored or mispriced” by competitors.
In Slide’s June 2025 initial public offering on the NASDAQ exchange, the company and early investors sold $408 million of stock at $17 per share.
The company is currently trading at $14.83 a share, a ~12% discount to its IPO price.
Bull Case: Highly Profitable Tech-Enabled Insurer With Durable Growth Runway Trading At ~6.2x FY 2025 Earnings
Sell side analysts highlight the company’s significant technological edge and growth runway.
Slide is the fastest-growing carrier in Florida, with its policy count surging by 253% since 2022. [1, 2] In its 2025 prospectus, Slide said that it has a “significant technological advantage” that allows it to “assess, manage and price risk for individual and bulk policy acquisitions.”
Slide also said that its “Al-powered insurance model” leverages a $6 trillion total insured value dataset to manage risk, optimize operations, and improve profit margins.
The company said this dataset provides "real-time intelligence to drive superior decision making" and enables it to build "superior artificial intelligence and machine learning tools” to streamline underwriting and "drive lower loss ratios by focusing risk selection on higher margin generating policies."
Slide’s technological edge is reflected in its extraordinary growth and profitability. The company delivered a 60% return on equity (“ROE”) in 2024, an increase from 47% ROE in 2023. Analysts project that Slide won’t match this performance but will sustain “high ROEs,” with Barclays estimates of 30% for 2026 and 25% for 2027.
Slide’s combined ratio, an insurance metric used to measure underwriting profitability in which lower is better, has steadily declined from 89.6% in 2022 to 72.3% in 2024. [1, 2] This outperformance is reflected in Slide’s net income, which has grown from $22 million in 2022 to $201 million in 2024.
Slide’s underwriting performance has been helped along by Florida tort reform passed in late 2022, which eliminated the state's "one-way attorney fee" statute. Slide said that these reforms have “significantly improved market conditions” in Florida.
As of this writing, Slide trades at ~6.2x the sell side’s 2025E earnings, per FactSet, despite its extraordinary historical growth metrics.
Read the full report here by Manatee Research
