Financial Comparison: Kingsway Financial Services (NYSE:KWY) versus Slide Insurance (NASDAQ:SLDE)

Kingsway Financial Services (NYSE:KWY) and Slide Insurance (NASDAQ:SLDE) are both small-cap financial services companies, but which is the superior business? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their earnings, valuation, dividends, profitability, analyst recommendations, institutional ownership and risk.

Earnings and Valuation

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

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Kingsway Financial Services	$147.33 million	1.99	-$10.73 million	($0.40)	-25.30
Slide Insurance	$1.16 billion	1.66	$443.96 million	$3.60	4.65

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

Insider and Institutional Ownership

72.4% of Kingsway Financial Services shares are held by institutional investors. 41.4% of Kingsway Financial Services shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 50.8% of Slide Insurance shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of current ratings and price targets for Kingsway Financial Services and Slide Insurance, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Kingsway Financial Services	1	0	0	0	1.00
Slide Insurance	0	2	6	1	2.89

Slide Insurance has a consensus target price of $24.80, indicating a potential upside of 48.15%. Given Slide Insurance’s stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, analysts clearly believe Slide Insurance is more favorable than Kingsway Financial Services.

Profitability

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

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Kingsway Financial Services	-8.83%	-72.50%	-5.67%
Slide Insurance	38.86%	48.38%	17.38%

Summary

Slide Insurance beats Kingsway Financial Services on 12 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Kingsway Financial Services

Kingsway Financial Services Inc., through its subsidiaries, engages in the extended warranty business services, asset management, and real estate businesses. The company operates through three segments: Extended Warranty, Leased Real Estate, and Kingsway Search Xcelerator. The Extended Warranty segment markets, sells, and administers vehicle service agreements and related products for new and used automobiles, motorcycles, and ATVs. This segment also sells new home warranty products, as well as offers uninsured warrant administration services to homebuilders and homeowners; markets and distributes warranty products to manufacturers, distributors, and installers of heating, ventilation and air conditioning, standby generator, commercial LED lighting, and commercial refrigeration equipment; and provides equipment breakdown and maintenance support services to companies. The Leased Real Estate segment owns a parcel of real property consisting of approximately 192 acres located in the State of Texas. The Kingsway Search Xcelerator offers outsourced finance and human resources consulting services, including operational accounting, such as bookkeeping, accounting, financial reporting, and analysis and strategic finance services; technical accounting comprising initial public offerings, SEC reporting, and international consolidation services; human resources, workforce management, and compliance support services; and advisory services. The company offers its products and services through credit unions, dealers, homebuilders, and consumers. Kingsway Financial Services Inc. was incorporated in 1989 and is based in Itasca, Illinois.

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.