White Mountains Insurance Group, Ltd. (WTM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So good morning. I'm Weston Hicks. I'm the Chairman of White Mountains Board of Directors. And on behalf of the company, I'd like to welcome you to its Annual Investor Day. We have a number of directors here and also a couple that are listening in remotely. In the room, we have Reid Campbell -- if you could just raise your hand when I call your name; Pete Carlson, Pete heads the Audit Committee in case you have any questions on the financial statements; Phil Gelston, thank you; Suzanne Shank; David Tanner, David is here somewhere or maybe he stepped in the other room; and Steve Yi. So in addition, we have Mary Choksi and Margie Dillon, who are participating remotely. So I would like to, at this point, turn the program over to White Mountain's CEO, Manning Rountree.

Thanks, Weston. Welcome to White Mountains Annual Investor Day. We're joined today by the full senior team at the White Mountains parent company. I'm not going to introduce them by name this year. They're all here. They would all welcome a conversation or a question inside bar after the presentation. I will introduce the senior teams of our operating companies as we proceed. And on the format, we're going to open for Q&A after each section in the presentation, and we're happy for you to interrupt us with questions as we go. All right. Let's get started. Okay. 2024 was an okay year for White Mountains. Adjusted book value per share was up 8%. Stock price was up 29%. The share price bump, of course, is nice, but we're most focused on book value per share and intrinsic value per share and believe strongly that the stock price will follow. We had particularly strong operating results at Ark and Outrigger and also at Bamboo. We had good results at Kudu and we had a bit of a mixed bag elsewhere. Investment portfolio was up 5.4%, which was a good result, and we have really been spoiled by consistently good investment performance over the last few years, which you'll see later in the presentation. We had no new capital deployments in 2024, but we've made 2 so far in 2025, a minority investment in BroadStreet, which is a large insurance broker, and a controlled investment in Enterprise Solutions, which is the first deal for White Mountains Partners, and we'll talk about both of those as we go. Here you see our returns in context. 2024 was a strong year for the P&C industry on both a book value basis and a market basis. The story of our relative returns in 2024 is pretty simple. Our P&C businesses, chiefly Ark and Bamboo outperformed [ peer and index ] returns, and our non-P&C businesses lagged index returns. Our goal remains very simple, which is to compound our per share values over long periods of time. Our target remains what we believe to be a full equity return for shareholders, which is 10-year T plus $700 million and we're focused on delivering that year in, year out. Let me now hand off to Liam Caffrey, our CFO, who will cover capital and financial position.

Thank you, Manning , and good morning. I'll go through a few slides just on our capital and financial position over time and then current state. So this is a slide we've shown over the past few years, which shows since 2017 over the past 8-plus years. Our by year and cumulative returns to shareholders, largely in the form of share repurchase as well as deployments. So 2 discrete periods we think of here. One is if you go back to 2017, fresh off the sales of OneBeacon, Symetra, Sirius Group. We found ourselves with about $3.1 billion of undeployed capital, which was about 75% to 80% of our capital base at the time. We then set forth to return some of that capital, but also redeployed over the ensuing years. So during this time, we made control -- capital deployments into firms such as Kudu, Ark and a number of -- basically most of the companies that you see here on this -- on the dias today, such that by the end of 2020, when we closed the Ark transaction in January of 2021, we were largely kind of back to being fully deployed. You then dial ahead a couple of years into mid-2022 when we had the sale of NSM. We found ourselves at that point with $1.6 billion of undeployed capital which we've then steadily worked down over time as well as returning some to shareholders. So in that first post OneBeacon phase, we redeployed $1.8 billion of capital and distributed out $1.5 billion. And in the past 3-plus years, we've deployed $1.4 billion and returned about $6.6 billion. Such that cumulatively over this period, we've redeployed $3.2 billion of capital and returned to shareholders $2.1 billion and our undeployed capital position right now is roughly $550 million at the end of the first quarter. That's pro forma for the BroadStreet acquisition, which is not closed yet as well as Enterprise Solutions. Next slide shows just a snapshot of our current financial position at the end of the first quarter. Total capital of $5.8 billion, which is principally in shareholders' equity. We have no financial leverage at the parent, but we do employ prudent financial leverage at our operating businesses, which includes our 4 consolidated operating businesses of Ark, HG, Kudu and now Bamboo. Our consolidated debt to total capital ratio is roughly 12%, which is up a little bit from last year, mainly due to some incremental draws at Kudu and the debt recap, which we completed earlier this year at Bamboo. And our undeployed capital, again, is roughly $0.5 billion or 9% of our total capital. So with that, what we'd like to do is go through each of the operating businesses. I'm going to have a little bit of a snapshot on the overall portfolio and then we'll go through each of the operating businesses. Manning and myself will do a little vignette at the front with an overview and financial position, and then we'll ask each of the leadership teams to come up and share some thoughts. So this pie chart breaks down our owners' capital per share, book value per share across our major businesses. You'll see that the combination of Ark and Outrigger is now our largest capital position. It represents about 27% of our book value base, followed by Kudu and HG Global, which each represent about 17% of our capital base. Bamboo is next, and those are our big 4 consolidated operating companies. Next, we have our nonconsolidated operating companies: MediaAlpha, PassportCard, David Shield, and we've added in Broad Street partners here on a pro forma basis; White Mountains Partners, where we made our first deployment this year. And then our other operating businesses, this is a combination of other consolidated and nonconsolidated businesses. This would include Elementum, for example, our strategic investment portfolio and then our undeployed capital base. So again, a fairly diversified portfolio at the moment, and we feel good about this spread and this capital base moving forward. This just shares a little bit more detail on 8 of our positions, our 4 large consolidated operating companies as well as 4 other ones of note. This just share some more information on the year of our investment, our ownership -- management ownership and then the capital base in absolute terms and per share. Maybe 3 points I would make on this chart. First off, we remain focused on insurance and financial services, 95% plus of our capital base is in insurance and financial services businesses. It's what we know well. It will be the main event for White Mountains indefinitely. Second point is you'll note that 6 of the 8 of these positions are consolidated or control positions rather. And of the 2 that aren't, MediaAlpha was a control position before we took it public in 2020, really BroadStreet is the only exception where we don't have control. Our job is to own and operate insurance and insurance-related businesses. So our preference is control positions, and that's the ballast of what we do. And then the third thing I'd point out on this chart is in the third column, you can see management are, in most cases, founders of these businesses and remain significant shareholders of these businesses. One of Jack's philosophies was always think like owners, certainly at the White Mountains management level, we're significant owners in the company and each of our management teams are significant owners in their operating companies. We believe this is important to align ourselves on the ups and the downs in terms of aligning incentives going forward. So with that, let me provide a brief overview of Ark, and then I'll turn it over to Ian. So Ark, as we've discussed before, is a specialty P&C insurance and reinsurance business, founded in 2007 by Ian Beaton and Nick Bonnar, who joined us today. Rides across 5 major lines of business led by property, but also specialty, marine and energy, accident & health and a little bit of casualty. The business is written via 2 platforms, a London platform, which is 2 Lloyd's of London syndicates and then an incidental syndicate. Ken, which you'll famously remember, we discussed last year, which was launched last year to host some of the new teams that Ark is bringing on board and then a Bermuda-based reinsurer, GAIL, which was scaled up with our capital investment in 2021. And Ark has been a consistent top quartile performer at Lloyd's over many, many years. So with that, let me introduce Ian to share a few words.

Thank you. Good morning. One of the things that I was thinking about this morning was on my speech but what I should wear today. I've done one with a jacket on, but no tie; another one with the tie and no jacket; what was it going to be this morning? And here I am. No clues. So last year was a good year. We're at the top of the market cycle, and that's been reflected in the results, a good combined ratio 83% U.S. GAAP and book value grew by high 20s. So one of our sort of 3 guiding goals is ROE of $15 million to $20 million we've managed that over time. And obviously, at the top of the cycle, you'd hope to exceed that, and that's what's happened. So we're pleased with the financial results. We're pleased with the underlying growth in the portfolio as well. So since White Mountains invested in 2021, first of January, we've scaled it up by about 3.7x, so 4x if you like to round it. And that was one of the big bets that you placed in us, which is could we triple the business? The good news is that in the right market situations, you can do that. We're going to always expect that. Rates are rolling. Rates last year were flat. They asked to add some color to the slide. So when you see flat, you should see up by 0.1%. That's how much color I add to these sorts of things. And that's why I'm wearing the tie actually. First quarter, the 25% more mixed. Normally, we're around that sort of mid early 90s combined ratio, and that's what we got in the first quarter of 2025. The shame of the first quarter 2025 was obviously within the first 2 weeks of 2025 happening is sort of blowing considerable amount of your first quarter cat budget. You want it to stretch out for 3 months and it wasn't even 3 weeks in, and we'd sort of spent it. So obviously, other than the shame of the actual loss for those individuals involved, it still didn't impact our combined ratio for the quarter, nor indeed the way we think about the year and the outstanding for the year because obviously, there's bigger cats to come probably for the rest of the year, and we've just a few days into the official hurricane season. So we'll see what that brings. Gross written premium on an underlying basis is up mid-20s as well year-on-year. Again, we wouldn't expect that rate of increase to continue, but it has this year. And we're down a couple of points on rate, and we'll go into a rate a little bit more and probably a little bit of an update on the [ 1 6s ] when we get to that chart. Do shout questions. If they're tricky, I'll hand them to Nick. That's what he's here for. If they're easy ones and complementary, I will take them. So this chart shows 2 things. The bars are the sort of premium build year-on-year-on-year. So you can see it's going up from a sort of $600 million to $2.4 billion trailing 12 months. And really, the mix of business is about half property, about 20% marine and energy, 20% specialty, which is a whole ragtag mix of things and about 10% accident and health and casualty combined. And if we look back on the 5-year plan that we persuaded strong arm to why Mountain is investing on, very much that mix is similar apart from the casualty mix. We never really saw casualty harden in the way that we had hoped and expected, and we would have expected at that stage, the long-tail component to be nearer 20%. And it's really nearer 5% to 10%, depending on how you view A&H. We're still looking for opportunities. We're still waiting, but it hasn't happened. So if it's right -- the margins right, we'll do it. And if we're not, we'll change the plan. The red line, which is really showing our combined ratio, the 98% is a bit of a cheat because that was a U.K. combined ratio before you invested. So some funnies in there, it's probably near a low 90s. I won't give you a number because otherwise the White Mountains finance team will smash me in the face afterwards, and I don't want that. So you can see it's been reasonably consistent in that low 80s since you've invested and we sort of came up the J curve in terms of the earnings because we're taking $650 million and then deploying it quickly, just takes a bit of time. So there was earnings lag in 2021. I think that's probably it on that one. This is a slide which I'll explain first. We showed it last year, and we've shown it for a few years because it makes us look good. And when you don't see this slide anymore, you know why we don't share anymore, right, sort of obvious. So we've got the Y-axis, which is -- so on the chart is a scattergun of all Lloyd's Syndicates that have been around for, since at least 2020 and that have more than about GBP 100 million gross net written premium. So the material syndicates at Lloyd's, there's 60, 65 dots up on that chart. And so it's rank ordered on volatility, so less volatile to the top, and it's rank ordered on profitability, underwriting profitability defined by combined ratio. So you want to be the very top right point and we've made that point by effectively making it green, green is for good. Yes, I'm sure you will have done that. And there's going to be a pink, but I can't see the pink the other thing on this slide here, but I'm sure it's pink on the big slide. And so what we've consistently done is the top quartile in terms of combined ratio and combined ratio volatility, which is one of our other key goals here. We define ourselves a specialty line company as defined by combined ratio and combined ratio volatility. So it's pleasing to remain there. We do have that third syndicate called Ken. Ken is not on this chart because it's not actually officially a proper syndicate at Lloyd's and it certainly hasn't been around for 5 years. So that's why it doesn't appear. So the market environment, what's changed year-on-year. We are half property, so that's a major component. And about half of that itself is reinsurance, mostly catastrophe excess of loss business treaty. And the other half is what we call property D&F mostly, direct and faculties. So these are shared and layered programs for big clients. So you don't have to be on the primary, you could be on the excess. So there's many ways of playing that. And what we're observing at the moment is that property is softening. I think year-to-date, we're off 4 and 5 and that was consistent with the [ 1 6s or the 6 1s], as you call them, for June. It's sort of a down 5 story. Marine and Energy is now flat and rolling down 2 or 3 points this year, year-to-date. There's a mix in our marine and energy portfolio. Again, it's about 50-50 reinsurance and insurance, and that's upstream energy. So sort of exploration and production, it's hull, it's cargo, it's marine liability, it's energy liability. So a broad spectrum of Lloyd's style classes. And then specialty is anything that doesn't fit into the 2 ones above it and the 2 ones below it. And so that will be a little bit of cyber, little bit of war, a little bit of terror, little bit of a product sort of political risk, et cetera. So that's quite nuance, so it depends by each of those micro classes. So broadly speaking, it will be up 5% to down 5%, depending what the class is within that. A&H, excellent health, always seems to be flat apart when it's about 20 years ago, it shifted up the gear. So it continues to be flat. And then there's pockets of opportunity we're seeing in casualty now. So casualty insurance is pretty up, 5% to 10%. And casually reinsurance in the very specific small areas we play is probably near up 5%. So I think that's probably not demonstrative of the broader market and what's happening there, but very specific to the small amount of casualty treaty that we write. So as you can see, property is now rolling. Marine energy is sort of at the top. And so we'd expect things barring another large catastrophe to continue in that direction. Uncertainties are bound and continue to unbound. Geopolitics, we are expecting losses to be settled, in particular with regard to the Russia-Ukraine and Belarus situation that impacted the aviation market substantially. Those are going through the courts at the moment. There have been settlements. The biggest settlements are yet to come. As a result of that, we think there will be an opportunity to enter aviation in a more meaningful manner, particularly with regard to aviation hull war. And so we've just hired a team to take the opportunity that we believe is arriving right now there. So that's one example of geopolitics. Obviously, there's India-Pakistan. There's obviously China-Taiwan. We don't know the answer to any of these, but we do think there's uncertainty, and we do think there's opportunity driven by those uncertainties because risk abounds. I suspect within the globalization and tariff impact, we'll be chatting elsewhere about the impact on investments. And obviously, that's probably the biggest impact for us is the potential for our investment portfolio, which also speaking, that one up. The second order impacts are really around trade and, for example, political risk book that we underwrite in terms of insurance is not a big book, but it is a book. And obviously the final one is well talked about, which is cat risk and secondary perils, the sort of the surge of the secondaries. So I think if people look at the California wildfire situation and talked about what they expected the return period to be on that before and afterwards, it's a very different situation that's led to significant repricing. So whilst we saw the [ 1, 6s ] perhaps going down 5% overall, we saw significant increases on loss-affected impacted accounts. So cash on cash rises of 30%, 40%, 50% depending on the client. So there are opportunities driven by the secondary perils, which are lesser perils and more uncertain. And then going forward, we've probably talked about the near term. We see barring significant losses at most classes continuing to drift down. Our plan was it was going to down 3% or 4% for the year. We're down to 2% and change so far. We have a broad portfolio with multiple classes with little things going on in a little classes the whole time. But we expect that rolling to continue in the near term. Longer term, always hard to get the crystal ball out and get it right. So we will get it wrong. But we do see structural changes. We see efficiency gains through AI to be done. We continue to see cyber as an opportunity. However you play that, it's there to stay. And we'll be moving our portfolio around as losses come in, and we want to redeploy and reallocate capital because we need to keep moving to at least stand still. And then we, last year, probably talked about these 3 teams, our Accident & Health team, the Marine Liability team and PV Terra team. that came on board. They're making good progress overall, some ups and some downs, but very much what we expected. And just more recently, we added a professional Lines Team, added a political risk team and this aviation hull war team, which is arriving as we speak. So continue to look for opportunities wherever they are. So if you know a good team, we're willing to talk. That's it.

All right. I'm going to cover one slide on Outrigger, please. So Outrigger, you'll recall, it's a sidecar vehicle. We stood it up on Jan 1, 2023. It was in response to Hurricane Ian. When Ian hit in November of '22, it was clear that it would attenuate the hard market opportunity in property cat. And Outrigger was designed to capture that opportunity. It's -- Outrigger is a flexible way for capital providers to earn superior returns on cat risk while they're available on the one hand, and it's also a way for Ark to increase its gross footprint on its Bermuda business on the other hand. Outrigger takes a straight 40% quota share of Ark Bermuda's XOL property book. It's sized at about $250 million and is fully collateralized. We've -- White Mountains has taken the largest slice over the past 3 years, and we filled it out with capital from smart money third-party investors, and it's worked well both for Ark and for White Mountains. In the 2023 underwriting year, we earned a 37% return, 2024 is 22%, and that's net of the losses on the California wildfires, most of which belong in the '24 underwriting year. And then for '25, we are on a modeled basis, we're projecting 32%. The '25 early renewals are done. They're in line with what we expected, and this should be shaping up nicely for '25. We'll stop there and take questions on Ark and Outrigger.

You mentioned you grew the book 4 times since you started with White Mountain. Can you just chat about what you've changed in organizing your company Ark to manage exposures, risk, people, et cetera?

In terms of the philosophy and approach, we've changed absolutely nothing. If we look at the book, effectively we've taken the London business, so we're 18 years old and sort of doubled London, and then we've added $1 billion and change to Bermuda. And so not a lot has changed in London other than we have -- headcount is up. We are now 250 people round numbers. And so all the processes, procedures, et cetera, well in play in London then, and then really what we had to do is cut and paste it to Bermuda. And so that approach, that philosophy was very straightforward. Underneath it, it was slightly more complicated because we had to replicate databases and data warehouses, and so there's some IT technical issues. But I mean this is all minor stuff and so easily sort of done and straightforward. So it's really just a scale up on the existing platform as we see it. I think A.M. Best saw it slightly differently, which was like half scale up and half start-up. We just didn't see it that way, and I think they invest now back in our view. So it's very much the same as before. Part of the problem then in terms of cultures, as you bring new teams on board is, do they fit with your culture and your approach and do they have the same philosophy in terms of risk management? And we spend a lot of time talking to teams that do have that fit and approach. We think our exposure management approach and cat risk management approach is slightly different from sort of perhaps the industry standard. But once you explain it, it sort of makes sense to those that come on board. So it's not a huge change. Does that answer your question?

So in light of the California wildfires, in light of all the uncertainties, the world is not getting any more -- any less risky. It's surprising that property is softening to the degree that it is. And so clearly, there's capital coming in, and I'd love your perspective on what exactly is causing that capital to come in and soften the market to such a degree?

Well, we're in a cyclical market. So it's the same forces of supply and demand and fear and greed. And if we take the wildfires as a combined loss, the combined losses you can argue about it, let's call it, $35 billion to $40 billion. And if you look at the sort of the, I'll call it, the global limit, let's call it, $0.5 trillion in what's a global rate online for that? I don't know, 6 to 10 points, depending on who you're going, you've got -- you just haven't have a big enough loss. That's -- and people have made good money on average for the last 3 or 4 years and it's excess of the cost of capital to the industry. So it's one of these cyclical optimizations, which is we've overreacted to the cost of capital. Now it's coming down and what's the new equilibrium point? We're not seeing huge amounts of capital coming in, and I think that was one perhaps change in this market cycle turn versus the last one, which was there was capital coming, but mostly on existing platforms rather than de novo start-ups. But nonetheless, you're right, capital did come in. But we also saw a differentiation this cycle between, I'd say, insurance and reinsurance. So often in the past, people talk about retro disappears because it gets burned which raises reinsurance rates because they're told in net, which then raises the cost of the insurance companies who then kicking and screaming, gradually have discipline imposed upon them by the capital layer above them. That didn't happen this time. People have lost plenty of money alone in insurance and the market cycle started turning insurance several years. In fact, before the reinsurance market imposed discipline as well. So you had a double kicker with Ian being the sort of reinsurance business. So limits are being compressed. So it's almost like they're akin to the velocity of money and the velocity of a limit in a way. And so insurance has hardened since '19 really because we've got those 2 different things happening. But fundamentally, the loss wasn't big enough and the surprise around the loss net at least wasn't big enough to move it. Now you could say, well, what it would have been otherwise in terms of decline in rate. And of course, we don't have those sliding door moments and can't live it. And so I don't know, but probably less than it had otherwise been. Yes, brilliant, Beaton for the insight. So we'll expect that to continue. The interesting interplay will probably be in the wind season, if it is busy, how have people's retro programs responded sort of now and what's left in terms of their retro programs and therefore, you might get unintended or unexpected consequences at the back end of the year, but that depends on the loss.

Two questions. First, in the recent years in the hard market, in addition to rate, the reinsurance companies actually achieved significant improvement in terms and conditions, improved structures, high attachment points. So the question would be, do you see any changes in softening and more recent renewals in this respect?

So would I answer that one first before I forget. I need to hold about one question at a time in my head. So fundamentally, it's a pricing thing at the moment. So attachment points are holding pretty steady at the margin they're changing and Ts and Cs are pretty steady as well. So it's mostly a rate.

Okay. And the second question, it appears that the Lloyd's market is increasingly competitive, particularly in property like life shared and layered accounts. So -- and do you see any changes coming with the new management and this, what you call it, iron grip underwriting doctrine that you just talked about?

The iron grip, it sounds like a movie, doesn't it? I guess -- firstly, you're absolutely right, the observation that sort of D&F is probably the fastest moving downward segment, but it's also probably been the most profit segment for a number of years for those that are involved in proper D&F classes. Within that -- obviously, there's very different dynamics within the primary versus the excess. And so I think you just need to think about that, about where people have been playing. But writ large, you're absolutely right, the rate is coming down there fastest, but the adequacy has been highest. So you'd sort of expect that, wouldn't you? How far down and how fast it goes? Well, nobody knows. And there's obviously a lot of risk in that alongside the cat. So you're seeing different segments move differentially and obviously, there's big issues with battery storage, for example, and there's plenty of fires in sort of refineries still. So the power segment is quite different from other segments. So I differentiate there and how do you play in those spots -- notwithstanding that, you're right. And then sort of a commentary, I guess, on Lloyd's center and management. I think what Pat and the -- I'd say, the new team, but fundamentally, it's the same team that was under John now sort of stepped up a level. So John Neal, the CEO left. Pat, who is Chief of Markets has stepped into the CEO role; and Rachel Turk who is the CEO, has stepped into the Chief of Markets role. So the fundamentals are constant and consistent because they were there in charge or number 2 beforehand. And I think what the messaging is doing is just clarifying some of the statements that were made and perhaps misinterpreted. And so I think one of the fears was there's this, well Lloyd's should get to $100 million. It's not actually quite what John said. John sort of said effectively mathematically, if you just chase the annualized progression, eventually, we hit $100 billion at some stage. I think what Pat was just trying to clarify as new #1 is if rates are changing, that projection is off because it's all about underwriting discipline. And then the tension becomes about what the Lloyd's Center can say what it can see and what it can do, and that then is the challenge. So I'd say new management is not really new management. It's consistent and things haven't changed. But can they implement that in a time of rate change? It's easy for everybody. Almost everybody can make money in a hard market. I would say almost everybody, but there's people on that chart in the sort of the pinky red that I don't know how they managed to do it, but wow, well done them. I don't know if that answered your question? Or is just a ramble, sometimes a ramble?

Given the casualty rates rising 5% to 10% while property slowing, maybe you could talk about your appetite for writing more casualty business? And do you think that's adequate enough rate to compensate for the rising social inflation and area environment?

Okay. So as I said earlier, we said 5 years ago, what did we know? What do I know today? But 5 years ago, whatever I said was wrong by 5 years. And whatever I said today is just wrong by the amount that I don't know, but I don't have time as an excuse right now. So I can go back to you in 5 years and tell you how right or wrong I was. So -- and that's part of the problem with casualty, which is there is a lag time between you and you write the business. And then when you ultimately learn and understand your cost of goods sold. And so within casualty, we have doubt -- casualty is a huge umbrella for a lot of different things moving there. But we felt the underlying writ large was insufficient for us to make a big play in it. The only substantial play and change that we've had in the last 5 years on casualty was we entered the excess casualty insurance market written by a team in Bermuda because effectively, what happened was the market had a panic, it lost a lot of money, there's some very, very thin pricing for some very, very big limits. And the balance of the books and the pricing of the individual risks was wrong. And so for example, in Bermuda, probably 5 years ago, you'd have had a tower, say, for a Fortune 1000 style company, it might have been $1 billion or $1.5 billion. And that capacity just went, I mean it sort of halved and rates tripled and then the limits people put out shrunk enormously. So the amount of premium you're getting in vastly expanded and each individual risk that you're putting out, the balance of that premium to individual risk changed enormously. So structurally, the whole market changed. And we made a play in that, and we'll probably write about $100 million this year. And there are other pockets that move differently. And you could say in that book, if you're attaching excess of, on average, $150 million, $200 million, your social inflation issues and your nuclear verdict issues are very different versus a primary play where you're getting spanked with crudely put the cost of the life is $1 million to $5 million, and now it's $25 million without blinking type stuff. And so that's sort of GenX and those juries and nuclear verdicts are hitting not just that primary layer, but also those umbrella layers, where, quite frankly, it's just been carnage. But is it paying enough? And then how do you restructure those products. So I think there's some bad law out there. There's some bad verdicts out there. But fundamentally, we need to price it for the risk that we're assuming, we still don't think in those sorts of things down there, it's being priced adequately. Now then there's different dynamics in the treaty market and then what's the treaty of reinsurance of. So there's quite a few moving parts. So we're unconvinced by the rate movement of a 5% to 10% being anything other than keeping up with loss cost inflation, for example, writ large. So we continue to be unexcited and rather downbeat and miserable. And if you don't believe that, see me in a bar on a Friday night, right? Downbeat and miserable. So we don't know yet, but we're always looking for opportunities. So -- and they say, I don't do it. Well, you do 5% of your books, there's $100 million over there that you're doing. And of course, we just interest into professional lines, a small book there. So we are doing it when we say we're not, right? So -- but it's pretty specific.

Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Ian. All right. Let's turn now to Kudu. Let me introduce Rob Jakacki, Co-Founder and CEO. Also joining us in the crowd are Ben Ruffel, Director of Distribution Strategies; and Chris Shin, co-CIO. As a reminder, Kudu provides capital solutions and advisory services to boutique asset and wealth managers. It targets the so-called middle market, which are typically firms with between $1 billion and $2 billion in AUM and $7 billion or $8 billion in AUM. Kudu receives back what we call in our financial statements, a participation contract. It's typically a revenue share interest plus an equity participation right should the portfolio company have a subsequent corporate event. Kudu has grown very nicely since we first got started back in 2018. It's closed 28 deployments inception to date, and it is without question the leader in the middle market. The Kudu portfolio spans a range of investment formats, strategies and geographies. It's pretty balanced as a portfolio. It does have some emphasis on private capital and wealth management. In terms of capitalization and funding, and this is an important point, Kudu is approaching what we've labeled self-sustainability. And we've defined that as the ability to self-fund $150 million of deployments each year, that's about 3 or 4 deals per year. That's about what Kudu has done on average since inception, and it's about what the human capital chassis can do at Kudu each year. The change is that the funding sources are shifting toward reinvested free cash flow and incremental debt capital. And within a couple of years, we don't feel like we will need any more incremental equity capital at Kudu in order to sustain that level of deployment annually. And that will be an inflection point when we reach it for Kudu's running returns and its contributions to White Mountain's book value per share. Kudu is a great business for a company like White Mountains to own. The nature of our capital is differentiating for Kudu when it goes to market. And in turn, Kudu is a very nice book value compounder for White Mountains. So it's been an excellent partnership. We're very happy with it. Rob?

Nice to be with you this morning. 2024 in many respects was a typical year for Kudu. We evaluated on the origination side. We evaluated in excess of 60 opportunities, primarily in our core segment of private capital management. And the vast majority of those, we walked away from just due to lack of fit or other concerns. We did close on 2 transactions with specialized asset managers deploying about $100 million between the 2 of those. Over the course of the year, our existing portfolio grew nicely at a 7% rate. It wasn't an even 7% across the year, but it was a nice conclusion to the year, nevertheless. And over the course of the year, we saw a 9% ROE on a GAAP basis. A lot of the strength came from our permanent capital managers and our wealth managers. That momentum is carried into 2025, which despite increasing volatility in the markets, our portfolio grew at a 4% clip. So a good start to the year. And at the very beginning of 2025, we closed our 28th transaction with a specialized real asset manager in the Bay Area. With that transaction, we are now in excess of $1 billion in portfolio value, so a very nice milestone for us and one that we look to build upon. With that transaction, our portfolio stands at 26 managers, very diversified across strategy and geography. And as we think about our permanent capital model, which, as Manning pointed out, is a differentiator for us in the marketplace. One of the hallmarks of that model is the alignment of interest that we perfect with our managers, and one of the elements of that is not forcing exit rights on the teams that we're backing. But nevertheless, we have experienced several monetizations in our history, including 2 full exits where we had very successful outcomes in 28% IRR across those two. And we've also seen 3 partial monetizations wherein we completely derisked our investments, yet maintained upside potential. And in all cases -- in all of those monetization events, we've successfully redeployed that capital that was returned to us into new strategies. So it's -- you see that reinvestment profile that Manning alluded to as well. One thing I'd like to point out is the -- our performance and our results, we think are reflective of the underwriting rigor that we've implemented in our business since the very beginning. In excess of 75% of our investments are performing in line or ahead of expectations. And our managers, we are very careful in selecting have successfully navigated some exogenous factors out in the marketplace over the past few years, COVID, rising rates and more recently, the tariff tornado showing exceptional skill and now getting through those challenges and executing their plans. This chart here shows the evolution of Kudu's capital base over time. I'd like to point out a couple of things on this chart. The bottom bar reflects Kudu's net equity position over time. An important thing here is you see visually the leveling off of that net equity relative to the overall asset value of the business, showing increasing redeployment of free cash flow as well as renewed borrowing under our credit facility with Barings MassMutual. We put a pause on that facility or using that facility with the rising rate environment, but have since started to resume borrowing under it and are working with our friends at Barings to upsize the facility, expand the facility in step with the growth of our portfolio as well as improving our borrowing terms. But overall, we see this flywheel effect that if you extend this graph into the future, we'd like to see that continue to exhibit itself where the retained earnings and free cash flow that the portfolio is generating will increase relative to the overall size of the asset position. And then lastly, just to point out some financial metrics of the firm, the blue line at the top, is Kudu's GAAP ROE figure. Now this includes unrealized gains and losses. So there is a little bit of variance year-over-year. The bottom line, by contrast is the Kudu's levered ROE figure. This is kind of our depiction of cash yield at any point in time. This does tend to travel in a more narrow band, reflecting stability of our business model and a couple of things that attribute to that. The preponderance of management fees and our revenue mix lended that stability as well as the inherent stability of the permanent capital managers and the vehicles that they manage, keep somewhat less susceptible to knee-jerk market movements that might arise from time to time. As we think about this line going forward, we expect it to continue to rise, reflecting both the seasoning of the portfolio as well as increased efficiency in our funding of new investments going forward.

Questions on Kudu.

The thing that kind of sticks out from the page is that you lever to return is at or below your cost of debt capital. And you sort of maybe touched on that with respect to kind of your credit facility and the terms there. But why use debt at all, if your cash yield -- your unlevered return is slightly higher than your levered return. Clearly, that's not something that you think is going to sustain. You obviously want to do a lot better than that.

Yes, a couple of things. First of all, I think for the duration of our ownership of Kudu, White Mountains' ownership of Kudu, the thing to focus on is GAAP ROE because that's the whole shooting match. And that includes unrealized gains and losses and it includes realized gains and losses. And we're very comfortable that even on the current terms, we're borrowing at rates that create positive financial leverage, vis-a-vis GAAP ROE. So we're very comfortable on that basis. Second thing is I think our borrowing terms are going to improve and improve a lot as we get bigger and more creditworthy and seasoned in the portfolio. And third, I think both of these numbers are headed -- are sloping up as the capital funding sources continue to migrate in the way we've discussed. Are there questions on Kudu? All right. Well, thanks, Rob.

Let's turn to Build America Mutual and HG Re. Allow me to introduce Kevin Pearson, who's President of HD Global. He'll be presenting today; and also Sean McCarthy, CEO and Co-Founder of Build America Mutual, who's in the crowd. He has told me he'd be very disappointed if he didn't get called on with the questions. All right. BAM is a financial guarantor of central public purpose municipal bonds. That means bonds issued by state and local governments to finance things like new schools and sewer systems and university housing. It's important to keep the structure in mind. The structure is complicated, and it's good to get refreshed. BAM is the primary insurer that faces the market, and it's a mutual company that's owned by its municipalities and the same municipalities that use its insurance on their issuances. HG Re is a single-purpose first loss reinsurance company, and it's a private stock company that's owned by White Mountains. White Mountains provided BAM's formation capital, which included $500 million of surplus notes. And so when you cut through it, our economics come from 2 places. The reinsurance profits on the business at HG Re and the payments on the surplus notes. Now this economic reality has been somewhat obscured by the GAAP accounting over the years. From inception, White Mountains consolidated BAM as a variable interest entity. And that had the effect of bringing BAM's gross accounts on to our financial statements and then backing out minority interests, and I think that confused people for a long time. This changed at the end of second quarter 2024 when White Mountains deconsolidated BAM. And so from that point forward, we'll be presenting HGG in our financial accounts on a stand-alone basis, and that is a pretty good representation of the economic reality of White Mountains owns. One more note on the accounting to get too wonky, but I think it's worth mentioning. Prior to deconsolidation, we were in the habit of reporting adjusted book value per share numbers for White Mountains' ABVPS, and there were 2 adjustments, really the main 2 adjustments in that figure, both related to HGG. The first was we fair valued the surplus notes by applying a time value of money discount to the notes. So it was a negative to value. And the second was that we added back HGG's net UPR, which is a standard adjustment in the financial guarantee business. That was a positive adjustment. One of the implications of deconsolidation is that the surplus notes are now fair valued in GAAP and the GAAP accounts themselves rather than carried at face value. And so the need to introduce that discount and the adjusted numbers has gone away. And so having thought about it -- rather than carry on making a single adjustment for the net UPR, we decided at year-end just to drop the adjusted book value per share numbers altogether and go with GAAP. Now the HGG's net UPR is still there and it is still real. And it's about $200 million of assets that will turn into profit and free cash, assuming BAM maintains its 0 loss underwriting standard. So that's real money, and it's -- we'll continue to show that figure in the segment accounting for HGG in our books, but we're not going to tie it off to a White Mountains per share level adjustment for the shareholders anymore. We'll leave that to you guys to sort out however you chose. All right. I think with that, I'll introduce Kevin.

Thank you, Manning, and good morning, everybody. So as Manning had mentioned, it was a bit of a mixed year for both HG Global and BAM last year, but there were some pretty notable highlights. HG Global's growth and adjusted book value decreased to a rather disappointing 6%, but most of that decrease was really driven by a change in the fair value of the surplus notes and unrealized losses on the investment portfolio. On the BAM side, BAM ended up having a record year in terms of par insured. They insured $20 billion of new par, which was up 26% year-over-year and up 13% from their previous record level. Their total premium also increased to $136 million, which was up 4% year-on-year and actually was the second best result ever. However, total pricing decreased to 69 basis points, which was down 18% year-on-year. And that was really driven by a change in the mix of business that BAM wrote. So BAM operates in 2 distinct segments of the market. The first is the primary market where issuers purchase bond insurance from BAM directly for new issues that they're intending to place in the market. BAM's pricing is really -- is a function at that point of the difference between the spread for that issuer of issuing on an uninsured basis or an insured basis. The second segment that BAM operates in is the secondary market. And that tends to be much more transaction specific. And so typically, we see much higher pricing. The 2 segments are really complementary to each other in general. So for example, when volatility is low, you see much higher primary issuance and lower secondary market activity and that's exactly what happened last year. So in the middle of sort of 2024, we had about a 6-month period when rates were very stable or even declining, which really encouraged a significant increase in the amount of primary deals that were issued and a much lower percentage, obviously, of secondary market business that was done. The other point we made for last year with BAM was that they began to pay -- they agreed to pay semiannual payments or mix some annual payments on surplus notes. So they made a payment of $8 million in June and then another payment of $22 million at the end of the year for a total of $30 million, which was up from $27 million last year. So far, they paid $282 million since 2017. The first quarter is also -- has been a bit mix for slightly different reasons. We do continue to see a lot of primary issuance in the market. However, a lot of it is also being driven by large transactions that have very high capital charge and therefore, a low return on capital. BAM kind of generally avoided that during the first quarter. So we did see a decrease in primary market activity relative to the first quarter of 2024. Help me know on the other side was stronger secondary market activity, which improved pricing for that first quarter. The other important thing for BAM in the first quarter as they executed their fourth Fidus transaction for $275 million and closed their first Fidus transaction, which had a balance of $100 million at the same time. So the net addition to claims paying resources was $175 million. The deal was very well received by investors and ended up being bought by a broader group of investors. And as a result, pricing ended up declining quite significantly. Thus far, BAM has $575 million outstanding of total Fidus, and that represents about 30% of their total claims paying resources, and it continues to be a very effective and efficient source of claims paying resources for them. Very quickly on total pricing. I just wanted to highlight how the impact of secondary market can have. So if you look at 2022, total pricing was 91 basis points and that was very much driven by secondary market activity. So secondary market activity accounted for more than twice the amount on a relative basis to what it did in 2024. The financial guarantee industry obviously remains very capital intensive. I think the most comprehensive measure for that is claims paying resources, which really consists of statutory capital plus any collateral that's for second -- sorry, for reinsurance transactions and then BAM's UPR. BAM has grown that significantly over the last several years. So in 2024, they ended up with total claims selling resources of just under $1.7 billion, an 11% increase from 2023. All of that growth was either organic or -- and some collateral from a tender option bond program that BAM entered into. Obviously, with the Fidus 4 transaction in the first quarter of 2025, we saw another 10% increase in claims paying resources to just over $1.8 billion. Last year was a really bellwether year for the muni market. We obviously had a couple of years where total issuance was well below average, and issuers really made up for that last year. We saw a record of just under $500 billion for long-term issuance in the market. And the encouraging thing, I think, from our perspective was that insured penetration -- overall insured penetration remained pretty flat at 8%. So in spite of the significant increase in issuance, the penetration rate held firm, which I think bodes well for future growth in the penetration. I'd also point out that since inception with the exception of 2020, the upgrades from rating agencies have far outpaced downgrades in the muni market, yet we've continued to see the penetration rate increase, which again, I think, bodes well for additional increase in penetration. Finally, one of the headwinds that BAM faced last year, and it was kind of surprising, given the increase in volume, you sort of normally expect spreads to widen a little bit. And that just didn't really happen last year. If anything, yield ratio sort of decreased, and we saw tighter spreads on some of the better rated munis that came to market. We are seeing finally a little bit of a crack in that this year. Obviously, with the federal policies that are being sort of talked about, that will have a -- well, likely to have a negative impact on muni spreads, which obviously is very beneficial to BAM, because it only increased -- just increases their pricing power. So our written premiums have been fairly steady over the last several years. But what you'll see is, obviously, earned premium have been increasing each year, and we expect that to continue, obviously. And what that really reflects is the high growth in the BAM portfolio over the last 10 years. On the investment side, we have had some volatility and variability in our investment returns, but that's really just driven by movements in interest rates. One thing is we are a hold-to-maturity investor. So even when we have unrealized losses, those typically unwind as we pull the par at the maturity of those investments. So the real focus for us is on book yield and book yield has increased from 2.6% in 2023 to about 3.7% now. So as we rotate that portfolio, which has a short duration, it's about 4 years, all fixed income. As we rotate that portfolio, we're obviously going to continue to see our book yield increase. One quick comment on UPR in -- first quarter of 2025. You will see a slight dip there that from my perspective, is really an anomaly. It is a function of both lower business in the first quarter and then also higher refundings in that first quarter. But from my perspective, by the end of the year, I fully expect that to have the similar growth rate that we've seen in the last few years. So our key priority, obviously, is to continue to grow -- or contribute to the growth in White Mountains' book value per share. How are we going to do that? Well, first, we want to grow written premiums, and so we continue to work very closely with BAM to try and find ways where we can do that by not so much increase in the underwriting risk of the existing portfolio, but really by trying to find deeper penetration into the sectors that they're already operating in. Second thing for us is optimizing investment returns in the trust portfolio. So as I said, 3.7% book yield, the book value of our portfolios is about $675 million right now. So obviously, small -- even small changes can have a good impact on our investment income. We're not looking to change our -- the risk appetite within that portfolio remains we -- our constraints are we're very conservative, and so we're not looking to change that. But we do feel there are opportunities that we can take advantage of. Second thing we like to do is obviously maximize our cash flows. And the first way to do that is paying down the surplus notes or working with BAM to encourage and enhance payments on the surplus notes. Second is maximizing releases from the trust account. We obviously have constraints within that, but there is work we can do. And once -- with those releases, they can be upstreamed to the parent. BAM's financial strength is obviously critical to its rating and its rating is critical to its business. They continue to maintain AA rating, stable outlook from S&P, and that was just reaffirmed last week by S&P. One of the key factors for BAM with S&P is the -- is their capital base. So basically maintain capital at a AAA rating level. And that's through claims paying resources and growing those. So they've obviously continued to do that very effectively and are also using that capital very efficiently. I'd just say a couple of words in terms of growing BAM's lines of business. So again, on the primary side, we're not really looking to increase -- or to move to different sectors. It's really more a question of increasing the penetration in the targeted sectors that they're already in. One example of that would be the entry into Australia and New Zealand. So with that, they're really not looking to extend or expand the sectors that they'll be entering into those markets. Rather, it's, again, a focus on the business that they've been writing in the U.S. So essential public projects, and that's what they're going to do there in Australia as well. So not really expanding into areas that they don't already operate in, in the U.S. On the secondary market side, BAM has developed a very, very strong secondary desk. They're constantly looking to enhance their institutional utilization and also enhance their trade execution, and we expect that to continue to maintain their dominant position in that market. Happy to take questions.

With the current increased volatility, including in the bond markets, do you think that the secondary volume will continue to be strong?

Yes, I do.

So -- and basically, given that they have high pricing, that would support your premium growth, right?

Correct, yes. It was up 2x year-over-year in the first quarter, and we expect a strong year this year. But Sean, do you want to add?

Sure.

Thank you, Julia, for this.

A couple of things about the market. This is an interesting year. It's a record year in terms of volume, both -- and I think it's going to be a record year in terms of activity in the secondary market. Two reasons. There's a lot of concern about what's going to happen in Washington as it affects tax exemption. It also -- so what we find is utilization has had a record high. This past week, for example, the new money issuance in the market was $20 billion, which is a record. We see that volume still moving forward. But -- and normally, when primary market volume is up like that, secondary market volume, as Kevin pointed out, is lower just because the market complex is trying to absorb new issue. They don't have enough time to think about secondary market increasing value-added in their portfolios. That's not true this year. We're seeing still a steady activity in secondary market as well as primary. And we're the dominant provider in the secondary market, about 75%, 80% of what is insured in the secondary market. So as Kevin said, we've got a very sophisticated way of looking at people's portfolios and making trade suggestions. The history is when you make that suggestion, if it's something that the institutional investor is interested in, and we get -- we get an execution at that level. We don't have to share the savings with the issuers. So in the primary market, nobody uses us without saving money. But in the secondary market, it's really just getting an execution that improves the performance of the portfolio. So we don't have to share that savings with an issuer. And that's the powerful reason why there's a difference. So that's a long-winded way of saying that we think there's going to be continued activity in that market, and I think that's a good fact.

There's a question from the Internet probably best for Sean. Does your smaller size relative to your publicly traded competitor create issues for you? Or is there enough business to go around?

That's an interesting point. One of the things that we've been focusing on in the last calendar year is utilization of bond insurance on partials of large transactions. Personally, I'm very focused right now on rate online, making sure that we are producing greater economic value per amount of exposure that we're taking. So one of the unique factors in that is that we have had a lot of success at guaranteeing the term bonds or the final couple of maturities of long-dated transaction, which have better economics for us than if we had guaranteed the whole transaction. And the market is taking that as an effective way to use the insurance. So it's a positive for them because they're trying to sell shorter-dated stuff through retail at a higher level in many cases. And for us, it's a greater efficiency because the institutional investor is really focused on the term bonds, term financing as they're investing that. So I'd say it's not a disadvantage. We have a very different goal than our publicly traded company. I'm not really focused on being #1 by par. I think it's an illusory issue, I don't think. What we really focus on is the fact that we look at our business and make sure that we are deploying capital at an important level, and therefore, maximizing our value. What we see with our competitor is we sort of -- we track everything from -- one of the great things is when we hired a guy from BlackRock when they got acquired. And we have a fantastic database, Build America Mutuals book of business model, and we take every piece of data from every deal that we do from deal inquiry to financial reporting. And it gives us a really powerful tool to analyze what's happening both present and future. But also, we measure bid-to-cover ratio. We track a whole bunch of information, which makes us tactical in where we're trying to pursue. So if you think about bid-to-cover ratio, for example, the average in the industry is sort of in the high 80s percent. But we'd see a very different number in that when transaction is over $100 million, where the bid-to-cover ratio when we're losing is sometimes 50%. So that's okay with us. I'm not trying to be #1 by par. I'm trying to produce attractive business as underwritten deal by deal, and we track it live every day.

[ Guy ]?

First question for you, Manning. Does White Mountains guarantee or back the liabilities of Build America or HGG?

It does not. It's a closed system, and the capital that we have and the trust is the capital at risk. No call on parent capital.

Okay. And Kevin or Sean, does -- do you have to post collateral on a downgrade action or any other sort of nondefault but relevant event?

No, no. For HG Global, do you mean?

For both. For both BAM and HGG.

I'll just speak for HG Global, and Sean can speak for BAM. But no, we don't have to post any additional collateral. So as Manning said, it's all within a closed system. So essentially, when BAM writes new business and they seed it to us, the gross premium -- net premium ends up in the collateral trust directly.

For BAM, for every transaction, we -- unlike sort of general banking or even general insurance regulatory capital, which have very broad categories, we have very discrete categories. So we know by rating and by kind of transaction, whether it's a general obligation, which is a full faith obligation of state and local government, versus a hospital, how much capital we're consuming per transaction. And so we have a whole business which monitors improvement in ratings just over time as the transactions strengthen, and we take that -- we present that to Standard & Poor's and get credit for that. Correspondingly, if there's transactions that get downgraded, the capital amount would go up. But it's a very small amount, unless you fall into the noninvestment-grade category, so -- which we have no transactions that are of any significance whatsoever that are candidates for that.

Yes. Two separate concepts here, [ Guy ], that -- first of all, BAM's AA rating, which is essential to the business. It's governed by S&P with reference to their capital adequacy model. In that model, upgrades and downgrades matter to capital adequacy, but it's fairly marginal for a given credit as you would imagine. Separately, on cash posting. BAM's fundamental promise is to pay timely principal and interest. That's the trigger for cash to be put up first by the primary and then Fortune's following by the reinsurer. That has never happened in the decade plus that we've been operating at BAM. We've had no losses. We write to a 0 loss underwriting standard. And we have no loss reserves, and we don't expect to, if we continue to execute in the way that we are.

That's correct. We have a very conservative risk appetite. And as Kevin pointed out, our attachment points and growth opportunities are trying to expand in a more granular way utilization of bond insurance without increasing our credit appetite.

Can you just clarify what White Mountains' assets are in the trust account? Is that just a BAM surplus note? Or is it also HG Re stuff? And then secondly, can you just provide some perspective about the reasonableness of S&P's requirement of what's in the trust account? Is this painted by the MBA impact history? Or is there intellectual framework around how much -- whether the $1.8 billion is the right amount to be AA?

Yes. Let's take it in reverse order. So with S&P, they look to the claims paying resources and capital adequacy of the BAM system as a whole. There are multiple sources of capital, really 3 pools. BAM has its own capital base that's been building up over time with member surplus contributions, retained earnings. They have access to the HGG capital base. And then they have raised capital in the form of Fidus transaction. So all 3 things are in play. S&P looks at the world on a consolidated basis. S&P does their models and their models are their models. I can't -- I don't have a view on whether they are reasonable or unreasonable.

I'd say that it was about 7 years ago, they formally unified and standardized the requirements that are published for obtaining different ratings as a financial guarantor. We thought that was the good news. We have a very open dialogue with Standard & Poor's. We don't anticipate nor do they state -- they just had their S&P Insurance Conference, and I think they're very happy with how we're doing for 3 reasons. First, our capital, as Manning pointed out, is hard capital. Two, we're muni only. So it's -- the chances of not understanding risk complex transactions or taking transactions that have greater volatility, we don't do that. So -- and the third thing is that we've maintained a conservative bias not only in our underwriting but in the investment of our capital.

And coming back to your first question about the assets that HG Re has in its trust, it has about 75% or 80% of the surplus note receivables are in trust. The rest are in the parent company. That's -- there's a long history of that. It's not important. And on top of that, it has the UPR that's building up, net UPR as well as the initial capital injected in HG, which is $100 million, which has grown with earnings.

And I think one important thing about our business is, each year, we add a stream of business that will earn over time, long dated. So we're -- our idea is to make the wave bigger every year and to make sure we don't have defaults. It's the only thing we could do that would affect our performance. And so as we mature, I kind of think of us as through older teenagers at 13 years into our business that the wave is bigger, stable. And when we look at what we're doing, we're really, again, trying to sort of optimize that.

Are there questions on BAM and HG? All right. Thanks, Kevin.

And again, thank you for White Mountains' support for all these years.

All right. Now we will flip to the other side of the stage to talk through Bamboo. Bamboo was an acquisition that we made in January of last year. It's a homeowners' insurance MGA, founded and led by John Chu, who joins us today. John has had a distinguished career in the property and casualty industry over many decades, including at firms such as The Hartford and Pacific Specialty. We believe Bamboo is a differentiated model in the industry with both near and long-term competitive advantages. It's a commission-based MGA model that's backed by blue-chip distribution and reinsurance partners. It was strategically launched in California, taking advantage of some of the industry disruption there but now expanding into additional markets. I believe it has an underwriting advantage driven by proprietary risk management and selection capabilities, has a modern, scalable, cost-efficient infrastructure that's supported by incremental AI capabilities such that we believe it's a scalable and a transportable model. On the next page, I'll do a little bit -- some folks understand the MGA model very well. Others don't. I thought I'd just do a poor man's schematic of how it works. So at the top, you've got customers and agents who come to Bamboo for homeowners' insurance. Heavily, this includes today independent agents and what I'll call kind of captive, with a quotation mark, agents, which is an Allstate or a Farmers agent that's sitting in California. And guess what, Allstate and Farmers won't let them write any Allstate or Farmers product. So they have a client base they need to support their business, but they don't have access to product. So Bamboo partners with them to provide a homeowners' product to satisfy these agency forces. Bamboo quotes the policy, binds the policy, places the policy, services the policy and claims over time. The paper is, in this case, a licensed fronting, a set of licensed fronting carriers that are A- rated or higher. Those fronting carriers then pass the risk on to a panel of reinsurers, which is a first layer of quota share reinsurers, which take the risk up to certain occurrence limits, mainly the attritional loss, and then cats above certain occurrence limits flow to a panel of cat XOL reinsurers. Maybe a few notes on that. You'll note both the fronting carriers and Bamboo through a captive do take a slice, do retain a slice of the risk. This is increasingly common in the MGA industry just to align incentives across the value chain between originators and underwriters. Again, it's a small slice intended to align interest. On the vast majority of the reinsurance, both on the XOL and the -- certainly on the XOL side but also on the quota share side is provided by third parties. John can discuss the reinsurance renewal he went through on April 1, but we are pleased to have strong demand for both of those panels and expanded the number of reinsurers, both on the quota share panel, including a new sidecar that was placed this year as well as on the cat XOL side, where we also supported that tower with a cat bond this year. And then you'll notice the White Mountains' CRV, which is a collateralized reinsurance vehicle that we stood up last year. That provided up to $30 million of capital to Bamboo for last year's treaty year, and we've renewed that this year for up to $10 million. Think of that like third-party capital. That is simply White Mountains making an independent decision that the economics on this program look good. And from a capital allocation standpoint, we want to put our money into it. It's 1 year renewable, not required. This is just us as a third-party putting money into the system because we see good returns in it. So that's how the system works. I'll share a couple of just financial overview slides on results and then turn it over to John to talk through the business. It was an outstanding 2024 for Bamboo. Managed premiums ended the year at $484 million, which doubled year-over-year. And MGA adjusted EBITDA was $53 million, which was up 7x year-on-year. They're also off to a strong first quarter performance, notwithstanding the L.A. wildfires. Trailing 12 managed premiums ended the quarter at $542 million, up 12% quarter-on-quarter. MGA adjusted EBITDA on a trailing 12 basis was $66 million, up 26% quarter-on-quarter. We also completed a debt recap, issued $110 million of debt at Bamboo, combined with regular dividends and a special dividend as part of that recap. Bamboo has returned $80 million of capital to White Mountains in the first -- a little over a year, so about 1/4 of our capital back in our pocket. John will talk about the wildfires. We really view that as a validating event for the business in 2 ways: number one, how the business delivered on behalf of policyholders; and second, how the business performed on a relative loss basis versus the market. As a result, they had a successful 4/1 renewal to their primary treaty, supported by traditional reinsurers as well as new sidecar and cat bond investors. And John and the team are in the process of launching new programs with additional fronting and reinsurance partners to support growth going forward. Just a quick schematic to visualize the ramp-up of Bamboo. So in the fourth quarter of '23, the last quarter before we completed our transaction, we had $215 million of trailing 12 premium, about $7 million of EBITDA, dial ahead to the most recent quarter. That's now $542 million of premium. So we've grown premium -- managed premium by 2.5x and trailing 12 EBITDA of $66 million. So we've grown that over 9x. So very strong scale-up, I think, demonstrates, again, a need in the market that Bamboo is serving and the operating leverage as they grow premium on what we believe is a scalable platform. So with that, I think that's the snapshot. I'll turn it over to John.

Thanks, Liam. The first slide I was going to talk about was the Bamboo experience with the California wildfires that happened in February -- January and February. As you know, it's probably the largest wildfire by an exponential number in California. If you use rough estimates, around $40 billion, which is kind of what the industry averages tend to be. We roughly incurred $160 million of net losses that went to our reinsurers. But on a relative basis, we have about a 4% market share in Southern California. And if you use the $160 million as the net loss that went to the reinsurers, it's roughly about 40 bps. So when you think about it versus the competition, it was a validating point for us in terms of how we've managed our exposures, especially toward large peril risks such as brush. One other note here for all of our reinsurers on the quota share side, which is roughly about a dozen, even with the largest wildfire in history, all of them had a net profit on the underwriting profit side. So it did give us a tremendous boost, frankly, in the industry as there was a flight to quality that happened during the first quarter of this year. Further, when you think about how we validated the experience, we leveraged all of our proprietary tools. One of the key hallmarks of Bamboo kind of being in the insurtech vein was leveraging all the different APIs and the proprietary scoring methodologies, specifically around how we do aggregation management, which lend itself, again, creating credibility with a lot of our reinsurers. The other thing that happened, though, is what we believe is a kind of a validating point for the industry is that we've talked about this thing called the new normal in California because currently, right now, the market has been very disruptive on the regulatory and competitive side. And if anything, the fires, what it did is I think it extended our runway and our window to continue growing at the pace that we have for at least another year or 2. So another positive attribute that our reinsurance partners liked. And the result of that is when we did our big 4/1 renewal, we want to do a few things. We wanted to continue creating additional capacity. So in addition to what we've normally done on the quota share and XOL side, we added additional sidecar investors, and we launched a cat bond. And I would tell you that what we did here is we overachieved, I think, on all 4. We were oversubscribed across all 4 dimensions of the capital capacity that we were looking to get. We added additional large reinsurance partners to our panel. We also achieved getting our sliding scale commission to be focused strictly on our attritional loss rate, which gives us a high degree of consistency and predictability of our performance. The other thing I would tell you is on the bottom 2. We did launch a sidecar vehicle in addition to the sidecar that Liam mentioned, and we were able to raise an additional $70 million within that structure. I do think there's probably another pipeline to continue to add to that as we look to grow and add capacity on that front. And then lastly, on the cat bond, we went to market with an issuance of about $75 million priced between 7.5% and 8.5%. We upsized the bond because we were so oversubscribed to $100 million, and we were able to get pricing at the lower end of that range. So all in all, a very net good result. Lastly, go-forward priorities. As I said, the new normal that we've talked about, it's given us, I think, confidence that we can continue managing our portfolio and growing at the rate of pace that we've seen over the last 2 or 3 years. Hence, the reason why we've continued to add capacity across all the dimensions on the previous slide. The next focus now is taking advantage of what we call our mousetrap that we've built that we think is both transportable and expandable. And what does that mean? Well, again, going back to our insurtech values, we love using something called a barbell strategy, which is really focused on where are the capabilities within our company, which is really at the front end and the back end. Front end in terms of how we work with agents, how we identify customers, how we segment and aggregate our portfolio. And on the back end, leveraging all the data. One of the things that we did this year that we're very excited about is we launched our new platform, which is in the middle of the barbell, which will give us scalability as well as new capabilities. In particular, we're very excited with the launch of our new digital capability to complement our agent distribution model. And then lastly, some of the other things that we're testing now that we think will add within the next 12 to 24 months is additional AI use cases. We have about 10 right now within our portfolio. We think that could easily double within the next 2 or 3 years, which will give us, I think, more insight and better opportunities to both be more efficient as well as identify new attributes that we can price against. So with that, any questions?

So a big problem in California is the FAIR Plan, right? And even though your underwriting performance has been just absolutely exceptional, to the extent you have a 3% or 4% share, you have to participate in fair plan losses and assessments. Can you talk about that and whether that's factored into the numbers that you gave us? And how are you thinking about that as a risk in the future?

So there was about a $7 million assessment to our program as part of the FAIR Plan assessment you're talking about, which we are going through a process. And the $7 million was passed to the reinsurers as well, but we're working with the reinsurers and the DOI today to recapture half of that back as per the program through additional policy fees, which we hope to recover within the first 18 months. It is something that reinsurers and we look at quite often in terms of making sure that the FAIR Plan is adequately capitalized per se so that there's no future assessments. But given the size of the fires that happened in California, it was something that was pretty significant.

Do you think subrogation recovery is likely in the Eaton fire? And have you seen any appetite to sell your subrogation rights to third parties?

Yes. I think the Eaton fire has an opportunity for subrogation. The $160 million we quoted here does not include any subrogation recovery. We are in discussions with several folks on that end. Right now, currently, I don't have an exact number, but we do think there's an opportunity to get some back there. As you know, likely in the several markets, it's not quick. So it will be a couple of years before any of that's realized anyway. But that will only enhance the performance of what we have.

Yes, that won't impact the MGA economics. It will flow to the reinsurance panel. So it will help the economics of the program for the reinsurers, which will benefit Bamboo indirectly, but it won't hit the EBITDA line for Bamboo in the MGA side.

John, could you elaborate a little more on the California market? So you said that the normalization has been delayed with the fires. And I know that the event we were -- we have been all watching is the State Farm situation. And it looks they got the rate while still pending the full public hearing, but -- so it looks like they'll hang around for a while. So could you just talk about -- and on the other hand, there's like not really interest from the -- any companies currently in the market to increase their appetite. So can you talk about that? What's the opportunities right now? And what's going on?

Well, this is just conjecture on State Farm, right? But we follow them very closely like everyone else. But they've done multiple filings. They did an emergency filing. And as you noted, they went through a public hearing and probably, I think, got less than half of what they asked for. As part of that, they were very vocal and very open about the fact that even with that rate filing, they were not going to start new business going again. So from there, I'm not sure exactly what their position is. I do know that they have another rate filing that's now being -- going through the public hearing process. So I don't know what the timing of that would be. In terms of new entrants in the California market, what we're seeing is mostly on the non-admitted side. We're not seeing much from an admitted carrier standpoint entering the marketplace.

I know that you offer -- you write both admitted and non-admitted. So are you comfortable writing on the admitted basis? And what kind of business would you write on admitted basis in California?

Yes, we're very comfortable right now with the admitted markets. If you were -- there's 2 things that really drive that for us, is one, do you have adequate rate to make targeted returns, which we feel comfortable with; and second, our distribution really likes the admitted market rate. Having A- rated paper gives us confidence on the retention level, especially in a market where seemingly more and more are going toward non-admitted, eliminates any fear that mortgagers or other companies that will require AM Best rated paper is negated. So we do think it creates a certain degree of stickiness and inertia for us long term. And finally, agents, again, because of the A- rating of our paper, eliminate some of their fairness of liability issues in terms of how they sell.

John, do you mind giving some more color and detail on the 4/1 renewals, especially on the XOL, given that your program was loss affected? What did you see in terms of price and things like limits and retentions?

In total, we were able to get pricing the way we hoped. I think we added a few reinsurers on the XOL. I think because of the cat bond, it gave us some degree of leverage, frankly, in terms of pricing with that since we did get losses like everyone else. But again, the amount of losses on a relative basis were less than the industry. So I would suspect -- I don't know what the actual numbers are yet for the 4/1 renewal in terms of an industry. I would say we're probably at the better end of that from a quartile perspective.

All right. So we're going to turn now to the nonconsolidated businesses, starting with MediaAlpha. Let me -- allow me to introduce Steve Yi, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. Just a couple of basic points on the business before Steve dials in -- dives in. MediaAlpha is a customer acquisition technology platform. It operates in multiple verticals but has specific expertise in P&C, health and life insurance. In simple terms, MediaAlpha enables advertisers who are often insurance carriers to acquire potential customer traffic in the forms of clicks, calls and leads very efficiently, very transparently. MediaAlpha is a toll business that collects a percentage on all of the transaction volume it facilitates. Today, White Mountains owns 25% of the company. So we're a significant shareholder but a minority shareholder. We mark-to-market the value of our ownership based on the stock price of MAX. And as you know, that's moved around a fair bit. Our original deployment into MediaAlpha was way back in 2015. It's hard to believe it's been a decade, and it's produced just great returns for us over the years, and we think there's plenty more on the come. So let me stop there, and welcome, Steve.

All right. Thanks, Manning. About 10 years, a long time. So I think 2024, I think as Manning has mentioned, was a mix year for us. Certainly, on the positive side was our outstanding business results. Again, about 85% of our business is in the P&C vertical. What that really means is that we're highly tethered to the U.S. personal auto market. And so our outstanding business results in 2024 were driven largely by the turnaround of the personal auto market as it emerged from, I think, what was really just generationally difficult hard market conditions in '22 and '23 into softening market conditions in '24. And as you know, or as you may know, during the softer market conditions, insurance advertisers tend to spend to acquire new customers, obviously, benefits our business. I think despite the strong business performance, the share price really was -- continued to be negatively impacted by the uncertainties around the FTC investigation into our under 65 health insurance business. Very limited on what I can say about the matter right now. I think what I can say is that we're in active discussions with the FTC staff to resolve the matter. And we remain committed -- notwithstanding our conviction in the legal merits of our case, we remain committed to resolving this matter as quickly as possible, and of course, in a manner that's in the best interest of our shareholders. So I think moving to 2025, we've seen largely a continuation of the positive trends that we saw taking foot in 2024. Our Q1 results, which were released a few weeks ago, came in above the high end of our guidance, both in terms of transaction value, which is our preferred top line metric, which measures the value of the media that's bought and sold through our marketplace platform as well as in our adjusted EBITDA. We don't give annual guidance, but looking forward to the remainder of 2025, we certainly remain bullish about the strength of our core auto insurance vertical. Even though we've seen strong recovery in that vertical, the recovery has been largely contained to the leading carriers in the space. And so I think as the soft market environment continues, we expect to see more and more carriers really leaning in and investing more in advertising, of course, which benefits our business. I think one foreseeable potential headwind are the automotive tariffs that could negatively impact claims costs in the back half of the year. I think the impact of this, I think, is -- I think, remains to be seen. But I think we and I think the rest of the industry remain cautiously optimistic that the impact of this will be manageable, primarily because of the strong profitability positions that I think most major personal lines carriers are in right now. And so I think there's a bit of room to give on the margin side. And again, we're cautiously optimistic that the industry can absorb that. And again, we'll continue with the investments that they're making to acquire new policies, which, again, is a very good thing for our business. I think if you look at our history, I think you can see really just the impact of the hard and soft market periods and the underwriting cycle in our overall business, again, because our business is so highly levered to the cyclicality of the property and casualty industry and again, more specifically, the U.S. personal auto space. This is also the slide where I try to convince Ian and Nick once and for all that hard markets are actually very bad things, and the soft markets are what we should be hoping for. So what tends to happen in hard markets is as carriers take rate, they pull back on advertising. And they do this for a couple of reasons. One is they don't want to acquire new policies where they don't feel good about their pricing. And U.S. auto insurance carriers, in particular, are such prolific advertisers that pulling back on advertising spend is really one of the few meaningful non-rate actions that they can take during these periods to address their profitability issues, address their combined ratios. And so what you see is particularly with, I think, online programmatic channels like ours where you can turn on and scale up and scale down spend at any time as opposed to sort of like out-of-home advertising markets, linear TV impressions, sports sponsorships, which require more of a lead time as you scale back and scale up, we tend to be, along with Google and Facebook and other channels like ours, disproportionately affected by the underwriting cycle. And so you saw the impact of that in '22 and '23. Again, I would say that, that impact in that period was particularly pronounced because of, again, the generational severity of that hard market cycle. But then on the flip side of that, as we look forward, during the soft market cycles, all of those dynamics working in exactly the opposite way. So the carriers -- leading carriers like Progressive and Allstate really look to grow. They can pivot very quickly as they did in 2024. They pivot ferociously, oftentimes to growth mode. And you can see that our marketplace model of hundreds of insurance comparison websites and carrier websites and lead generation sites, personal finance apps, ability of this marketplace to really grow to meet the growing demands or the growth demands of insurance carriers, I think, is unmatched. And you see that in our numbers to date and by how much more quickly we've grown than our similar, I guess, competitors in our space who don't have a marketplace model. So with that questions on MediaAlpha?

All right. Thanks, Steve. All right. Let's turn next to PassportCard/DavidShield, and let me introduce Alon Ketzef, Founder and CEO, and take a moment to recognize the leadership that Alon has demonstrated first through a global pandemic and now through a war. We're very grateful to have Alon as our partner. Just a few words on the business. PassportCard is an MGA, similar to Bamboo in business structure but focused on travel and expat medical insurance. PassportCard/DavidShield does not retain net underwriting risk. That risk is ceded to its global reinsurance partner, which is Allianz. PassportCard/DavidShield delivered its services more or less anywhere in the world. It provides coverage and settle claims in real time without paper via a debit card solution. And this is a better mousetrap, which drives very high levels of consumer satisfaction, premium pricing levels and high reactivation rates. Travelers and expats who use the product are highly likely to use it again, which is very unusual in the travel insurance business, in particular. Business was launched in Israel and remains Israeli centric. What I mean by that is that most customers who travel using our card are emanating from Israel. But again, we fulfill our services all over the world. And so our long-term goal here is to add new customer-facing markets around the world. We're doing this selectively, targeting markets that are large, that are accessible and with customers who appreciate the unique characteristics of what we offer. We're currently focused on 2 international initiatives. The first is expat medical in Europe that is an emerging business that is approaching breakeven and will be a profit driver in the future -- in the near future and leisure travel in Australia, which was reboot after COVID. It's much smaller but growing more rapidly, and we feel good about both of them. I'll stop there and hand it to you.

Thank you, Manning. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Pleasure to be here. Let me start with some bullish statement, if I may. Since the fourth quarter of 2019, you used to hear me telling you about monumental catastrophes that we are dealing with. And I take my chances now, and I would like to declare that those Bible graded years are over, and we look forward to 2025 to be a record year and to be followed hopefully by, if we stayed in the Bible mode, with a good 7 years ahead of us. So just to share with you a little bit about what is going on and what we did during 2024. 2024, I think that we mastered 2 main activities. Activity number one is how to manage the business in the most inefficient way. And by saying that, I mean that, as you know, after October 7, Manning and I made a decision not to fire any one of the employees. So we found ourselves with a machine that can produce top line of $300 million and found ourselves reducing $150 million, $200 million. So it doesn't get more inefficient than that. But we are proud. We are proud of making this decision, and I must say that we have a very, very strong team of people now that -- and the bandwidth that will allow us to grow and to grow fast from this point onward. The second thing that we did during 2025 is to try to take advantage of the situation and to develop a new solution that might just be one of our biggest leap of technology. And I will be happy to share with you later about this new technology that we are going to deploy. To join Manning with his optimism and to support him, I would like to say that, yes, Germany is progressing well. As you know, the product that we are selling in Germany is international health insurance for Europeans who leave Europe. It's a slow-growing business but very steady one. And it is built layer by layer. Once you get to the critical mass, it is a clear ride from that point onwards. The other market that we are working in is Australia, where we sell travel insurance. Travel insurance is a fast-growing activity. For the most part, once you get the spin wheel going forward, you should expect an exponential growth. We are not there just yet, but we start to feel that the trajectory is building up. And we see good -- very nice success in the direct-to-customer activity. The direct activity presents, over time, much better unit economics. So we are optimistic, and we expect good news from Australia, and of course, from Germany going forward. So as I said, 2025, we expect to have a record year. And we have a lot of catch-up to do after those bad 7 years. And we, by all means, ready to do this catch-up. And the team is ready to do that. And with the support of White Mountains, I'm sure we will get to all the heights that we were supposed to get up until now, and we will go even further than that. But before I'll answer any questions, I just want to share with you the excitement that we have as in 2 weeks' time, we are about to launch a new service, which is a payment service, a payment card that will allow our travelers to save no less than 10% on every purchase they make overseas. Again, 10% is a lot of money. And you may ask yourself, how can it be that we can save those 10%? Well, when you pay -- when your base currency is new shekel or Australian dollar for that matter and you spend money in Europe, the conversion rates and the different stages that you go through before your new shekel turns into a euro cost you about 10%. And we managed to crack this system. And from now on, within 2 weeks' time, an Israeli who goes overseas who wants to save 10% on his spending better use our solution. And the second thing that we have managed to produce, and I believe it would be the first service of its kind, is that any person who will use our cards in VAT-based countries will be able to get the VAT automatically -- the automatic refund of the VAT. Namely, you will swipe the card and after you leave the country within 24 hours, you will see the VAT refunded to your bank account. This is a revolution. And just I hope it will work. And if it does, then it will be a huge success for all of us. Now one may ask, Alon, everyone is fighting about the share of wallet and how to enter those cards into the pockets of the potential customers. Each and every one of us has so many cards that we don't want to use anymore, and we don't have space in our wallets. Well, there is good news here as well because the cards are already in the pockets of our customers. PassportCard, which is payment card for insurance benefits, is simply turning into a payment card for everything. So you'll have your insurance card when you go overseas, and you will be able to use the very same insurance card in order to do all your purchases overseas. So it's the same deal flow, just another feature. But if you want to save 10% and within 3 months, you would -- we would add the VAT refund service, we have a story to tell. And we plan on shouting it out loud. If it's successful, then I move to this side of the table. If it's not successful, then that's the last time you will see of me. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Alon. Questions on PassportCard? All right. Hearing none.

Thank you very much.

All right. I'd like to talk through 2 of our most recent deployments beginning with BroadStreet Partners, where I'll take this one solo. BroadStreet Partners is a leading insurance brokerage platform in the U.S. and Canada. It's about, call it, the #12 broker in the U.S. by revenue. It's a diversified distribution business, operates across client segments, geographies and product lines. It's 100% commission and fee-based economic model. There's no risk retention in the system. It's a platform that has a strong operating track record. It's founded in 2001, and in particular, a proven strategy on doing M&A and tuck-in M&A. They have a top-tier management team that's recently been augmented with some new joiners, including a new CEO, Mike O'Connor, who is the former Co-President at Aon and a person I go back 25 years with. We announced in April that White Mountains co-led a recap of BroadStreet alongside Ethos Capital and British Columbia Investment Management. That's taking a co-control stake from Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, which was the historical capital provider to BroadStreet and which will maintain a sizable stake. As part of that, White Mountains is deploying $150 million of capital. As I mentioned earlier, this is not a control situation for us. So it's an exception for us. So the question is, why would you do a non-control deal? And for us, the rationale is it's a sizable deployment in our core insurance space with a business and a team that we know well and like. We think the return profile on this investment will be quite good. I'll let the trade press speculate on the multiple, but our belief is we're coming in at a mid-teens purchase multiple, which compares favorably to other transactions, especially for a business of this quality. We think this can drive a high-teens return for us and an opportunity to double our money, frankly, with much more upside than downside risk in our opinion. So we like the team. We like the space, and we think it's a good deal for us. We expect the deal to close in the third quarter of 2025 following regulatory approvals. And once it's closed, it will show up on our balance sheet as an unconsolidated business, which will mark to a fair value each quarter. So happy to take any questions on it. All right. Hearing none, we'll move to White Mountains Partners. I'll provide a bit of an overview. White Mountains Partners is a wholly owned business unit that we launched in the fourth quarter of 2023. It's led by CEO and Managing Partner John Daly, who was a co-founder of Alleghany Capital. Last year, you'll remember John was in the audience, and we told him he couldn't speak until he did the deal. So guess what, John did the deal, so he's up on the stage this year. White Mountains Partners seeks to provide first institutional capital to family, founder and entrepreneur-owned businesses across 3 target sectors: essential services, light industrial and specialty consumer. We view it as a natural extension of the long-term value-oriented approach to capital deployment with White Mountains, but it's a chance for us to diversify into sectors outside of the core insurance market. We have a cyclical market with insurance, and Jack used to like to say there are times when given where we are in the cycle, the best thing we could do for investors is go golf. Now many of you don't know, Jack was actually an excellent golfer. The current management team is a little bit sketchier. So we're not huge on going to golf. So for us, our view is this provides an opportunity to steadily deploy capital into sectors that are diversified away from insurance. Our intent is to deploy up to $500 million of equity capital into this platform over time. And again, as we announced in April, John's made his first deployment, which he'll come up and talk about right now. Thanks, John.

Thank you, Liam. And speaking of golf, despite the name John Daly, I have no relation to the golfer. I know we share some similarities, but there's no blood relation. We are incredibly excitable for our debut platform acquisition of Enterprise Solutions and to partner with Jim Seabury and the rest of the Enterprise Solutions team. The company is a specialty electrical contractor that designs, engineers, prefabricates and install the electrical infrastructure for the commercial built environment. Specifically, they are focused on several key end markets, including health care, education, manufacturing and data centers. The opportunity falls squarely within our transaction rubric of wanting to partner with companies that are backed by long-term tailwinds that compete in large, fragmented and growing industries and are at an inflection point in their history where they are operated by owner managers who are excited to roll over equity, continue to manage their business for the long term and collaborate with a strategic thought and capital partner to help take their business to the next level. We see tremendous growth opportunities for Enterprise Solutions going forward to move from a regional player to a super-regional or even national player through bolt-on acquisitions in an incredibly fragmented market, entering new geographies, further penetrating key end markets and benefiting from the recurring and ever-present need to renovate and retrofit the aging commercial electrical infrastructure of the U.S. We believe that we entered the transaction at a favorable multiple in comparison to precedent transaction comparables. And we are well positioned to achieve a 2x multiple invested capital over a 5-year period, which is our typical threshold return. In terms of new platform opportunities, we feel we have a very robust and active pipeline of currently 13 active deals in various stages of due diligence. And our deal flow has been very strong year-to-date, seeing about 26% more opportunities versus prior year. So hopefully, that means I will be able to be invited back next year with a new platform opportunity to discuss. Thank you.

Any questions? We're wearing everybody down. Thank you, everybody. All right. We're in the home stretch. And now I'd like to call it Jonathan Cramer, our Chief Investment Officer, who's going to share an overview of the portfolio and recent returns.

Thanks, Liam. White Mountains has maintained a consistent approach to investments for many years. Our objective is to maximize long-term total returns after tax while taking prudent levels of risk. Policyholder funds tend to be invested more conservatively, generally in high-grade fixed income, and shareholder funds tend to be invested more aggressively. When you roll it all up relative to our insurance peers, we tend to have a shorter fixed income duration and higher equity exposure. It's important to note that we do not make investment decisions in a vacuum. Our overall capital position and broader corporate needs are all taken into account when constructing and managing our portfolio. Our total portfolio was valued at $4.8 billion as of the first quarter. $2.3 billion was in policyholder funds, and $2.5 billion was in shareholder funds. On the next slide is a snapshot of our portfolio positioning as of March 31 on a management basis. This excludes Kudu's participation contracts and unconsolidated entities such as MediaAlpha and PassportCard/DavidShield. Today, we have 3 distinct portfolios managed very differently. The first and largest is the Ark portfolio valued at $3 billion as of the first quarter. The objective here is to provide sufficient liquidity to meet our insurance obligations while managing for total return. We currently have a large fixed income portfolio with a short duration and average credit quality of A+. And about 20% of the portfolio is invested in equities and alternatives with relatively low beta. Second mandate is the HG Global portfolio, which Kevin mentioned earlier. It's had a value of roughly $700 million as of the first quarter. The objective here is to provide sufficient liquidity to meet our insurance obligations -- or sorry, in support of our reinsurance arrangements with BAM. We have only high-grade, short and medium-duration, fixed income instruments in this portfolio. As Kevin mentioned earlier, we do not invest -- or not allowed to invest in equities in this portfolio. The third mandate is the parent portfolio, which had a value of $1.1 billion as of the first quarter. The objective here is to safeguard amounts backing our known capital commitments and managing the balance, including our employed capital for total return. We currently have roughly 35% of this portfolio invested in equities and alternatives and the rest in short-duration, high-quality fixed income. When adding it all up on a consolidated basis, we have $3.8 billion in generally high-grade, short-duration fixed income instruments and about $900 million in equities and alternatives at Ark and the parent. It's important to highlight on the page here that our consolidated investment leverage is currently 1.1x. We view this as low relative to our peers, and that's largely driven by our capital deployed and non-investment bearing operating businesses. These are our investment returns on a management basis for the past 3-plus years. As you can see on the far right, we have outperformed all benchmarks over this period. Our shorter duration and exposure to floating rate investments resulted in our fixed income portfolio outperformance as interest rates have moved higher over this period. As a reminder, our equity portfolio is made up of 2 primary components. The first is liquid ETFs, which tracked the S&P 500. And the second is our alternative investments, which include market neutral and private equity funds. And over this period, our PE portfolio outperformed the S&P by a fair amount. In terms of individual years, 2022 was a poor year on an absolute basis but an excellent year on a relative basis. '23 was an excellent year on an absolute and relative basis. '24 was a solid year on an absolute and relative basis. Our fixed income portfolio performed well in a rising rate environment, but our equity portfolio lagged a strong return from the S&P 500 due to relative underperformance from our non-beta investments. So far in 2025, we're up 1.7%, a good absolute but mixed relative result. Our shorter duration has hurt relative fixed income performance, while solid returns from our market neutral and PE positions resulted in our equity portfolio outperforming the S&P. We're pleased with our performance over this period, and we hope to produce more going forward.

Questions for Jonathan? [ Guy ]?

I got to ask -- I've got to ask you about your market-neutral hedge funds that you're investing. And you have permanent capital, and your goals are long term -- maximize long-term returns tax efficiently. That doesn't seem super compatible with market-neutral high fees, sort of highly taxable type of vehicles, and I'm curious as to your thoughts on that.

The bulk of the market-neutral positions are in Ark. And there's a there's a specific rational role for them there, where we're spending most of our risk budget on underwriting and do not want to spend risk budget in the rating agency models on pure beta but want to get a diversified return with a strong risk-adjusted return profile. So that's where the bulk of the market-neutral stuff sits. There's a little slice at the parent, but it's not important. Julia?

Yes. On the fixed income side, do you expect to continue to maintain this quite low duration?

I think it's important to think about the component parts of the portfolio. So if you go back a slide or 2. Yes, this slide. I wouldn't start on the right. I would start on the left and walk through the columns because each has its own story. Ark is doing what it's doing with an eye towards defeasing policyholder liabilities and fixed -- with fixed income assets. So that will take its course and it will inherently be short. HG Global, as we discussed earlier, this is a place where we really hold to maturity on virtually everything. So book yield is very important. We're really not subject to calls on capital or liquidity needs at HG Global. So these assets are in trust, and the more book yield they can earn, the better. So there, if anything, I could see duration moving out and trying to capture all of the dollars of book yield available to us under what are fairly restrictive investment guidelines. And then at the parent, it ebbs and flows, we keep the fixed income pretty short because that's what's backing the capital deployment needs of the company, either known or unknown but likely to happen at some point. And what we don't have in high-grade liquid fixed income at the parent, we typically will have in some equity instrument or trying to earn a full equity return. Do you want to add?

No.

Other questions? All right. Thanks, Jonathan.

So what to expect from us going forward, it's more of the same. This has been the same slide since I can't remember when. Focus on growing our per share values over long periods of time, following our operating principles that come down from Jack, the most important of which is to think like owners. Wise words here. In short term, it's a voting machine. In the long term, it's a weighing machine. We're focused on the weighing part.

And on this slide, we'll open up for any final Q&A. None from the crowd. Any from the Internet?

Yes. One question. Markel is an insurer who in the last decade started buying operating businesses. Some suggest that their market value is based on book and continue to be valued that way, which led to valuation problems, poor returns and an activist as the operating companies were undervalued on a book valuation. The question asker says, White Mountains is analogous in a number of ways. Has Markel's experience educated you about risks and how to adapt with the White Mountains Partners business?

That's a big question. So a few reactions. First, Markel is a company that we watch and respect a lot. They've done a great job for their shareholders over many, many years. And there are some similarities in fundamental approach. I think we both see ourselves as book value compounders and so on. But I do think if you look at the composition of our business today and Markel's business today, they're pretty dissimilar. And I don't really think it's my job to comment on what's going on at Markel. But rather, I -- in the first instance, I'd just point you back to what we've just covered. We've gone over the composition of White Mountains businesses, the big 4 operating companies, the nonconsolidated positions, the good, the bad and the ugly. And I think we're in very good shape to continue to compound growth in our per share values for White Mountains shareholders. On the question about operating businesses, I'm not sure that's the answer as to why Markel's stock price has done what it's done. I think like most things, there are many factors at play there. It does relate, I suppose, somewhat to White Mountains Partners. We have had questions in prior quarters about White Mountains Partners and whether we believe that the share price at White Mountains will fairly reflect over time the value -- the private market value of the businesses that John acquires and builds, which I think is a fair challenge. And I would give 2 answers to that. One is proportionality. Let's all recognize that White Mountains Partners today is $60 million of equity capital. We aspire for it to be $500 million of equity capital, at which time it would still be less than 10% of our total equity capital base. So we hope that's going to be value creating, but I think it's going to be value creating to a degree. The second thing I would say is I think there's a little bit of a difference in approach between our mindset and Markel Ventures, at least historically, or Alleghany Capital, where John came from, in the sense that we are not afraid to trade and not unwilling to trade. And so if we see a value gap emerge between White Mountains share price and the implied underlying value of John's portfolio, we will trade on that one way or another. We can sell companies at White Mountains Partners that we think are undervalued, or at the extreme, we could buy back stock at the White Mountains parent. And we will do that. We will not let a value gap persist indefinitely at White Mountains. Anything you want to add?

No. I think you covered it.

I will just add that your disclosure is exceptional and superior in a lot of ways to what that other company provides on their ventures business. This event is probably one of the best ones of the year.

We'll probably have to cut back on the disclosure.

Fair enough. Question on your -- in your proxy, the compensation value per share. There is an adjustment from book value to compensation value within -- or I guess there's an adjustment to intrinsic value that you make. That's based on like a franchise value adjustment. And I'm curious -- I just want to understand that better.

So we have a concept called compensation value per share. Today, it's a 50-50 weighting of book value per share and what we call intrinsic value per share. And intrinsic value per share is our attempt to put a reasonably conservative estimate on the value of the company through a sum of the parts methodology. And it is important in certain circumstances, and I'll give you some examples. Let's take Esurance or NSM or now Bamboo. Those are businesses that, for different reasons, produce very limited GAAP returns on a running basis. In the case of Esurance, it's because we were funding losses to build a book of business and the advertising expense was booked upfront, whereas the lifetime economics of a customer only emerged over time. And so if you're growing, you're never catching up from a GAAP perspective. At Bamboo or at NSM before it, it's purchase price amortization, which is going through the GAAP return and taking a return -- producing a GAAP return. In both cases, it's pretty small, if not 0. So when you look at what's happened at Bamboo, I think it's beyond argument that we are creating value there. But none of it is coming through GAAP. So from a compensation perspective, if you don't acknowledge that and deal with it, it creates a pressure cooker, where there is pressure on management for realization of it to get compensated. We don't want that. We want to depressurize things and only take bids for our businesses that we feel are compelling and in excess of what we estimate intrinsic value to be. That's why we do it, and that's how it rolls up.

And the one change this year is historically, it was 50% adjusted book value, 50% intrinsic value. Since we've gotten rid of adjusted book for the cycles going forward, it's 50% book value, 50% intrinsic value. So we've just swapped adjusted for book there.

Other questions? Great. Thanks, everybody, for being here.