Greenlight Capital Re reports mixed Q3 results with strong underwriting offset by investment losses
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Greenlight Capital Re posts net loss of $4.4 million in Q3 2025, but achieves record underwriting income amid challenging investment landscape


In this transcript

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Summary

  • Greenlight Capital Re reported a net loss of $4.4 million in Q3 2025, despite achieving its best quarterly combined ratio of 86.6% and $22.3 million in underwriting income.
  • The company's investment performance suffered a loss of $17.4 million, primarily due to a 3.2% decline in the Solus Glass portfolio and a $16.4 million write-down in its Innovations investment portfolio.
  • The company anticipates continued strong underwriting performance and expects to renew most of its non-casualty business amidst a softening market, while maintaining confidence in its Innovations segment for organic growth.
  • Greenlight Capital Re's open market segment grew net written premiums by 9.5%, while the Innovation segment saw a 57.5% increase, although investment impairments led to a net loss for the segment.
  • The company undertook capital management actions, including share repurchases and refinancing, to optimize cash management and improve return on equity.

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OPERATOR - (00:00:00)

Conclusion of the event: Thank you for joining us today. An audio replay will also be available under the Investors section of the company's website@www.greenlightre.com. joining us on the call today will be our Chief Executive Officer Greg Richardson, Chairman of the Board David Einhorn and Chief Financial Officer Farmars Romer. On behalf of the Company, I'd like to remind you that forward looking statements may be made during this call and are intended to be covered by the safe harbor provisions of the federal securities laws. These forward looking statements reflect the Company's current expectations, estimates and predictions regarding future results and are subject to risks and uncertainties. As a result, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. For more information on the risks and other factors that may impact future performance, investors should review the periodic reports that are filed by the Company with the SEC from time to time. Additionally, management may refer to certain non GAAP financial measures. The reconciliations to these measures can be found in the Company's filings with the SEC, including the company's Form 10K for the year ended December 31, 2024. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward looking statements. With that, it is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Greg.

Greg Richardson - Chief Executive Officer - (00:01:28)

Thank you, David Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us. Q3 2025 was a mixed quarter with an exceptional underwriting result offset by investment losses. Overall, we reported a net loss of $4.4 million in Q3 2025, which brings our year to date net income to $25.6 million. Fully diluted book value per share decreased 0.4% in the quarter to $18.9 and increased 5.3% for the first nine months of the year. We reported our best quarterly combined ratio of 86.6%, translating to a record 22.3 million of underwriting income. This result was driven by a combination of the strong underlying profitability of the book, assisted by a benign cat quarter. We would be remiss not to comment on Hurricane Melissa. There are strong historical ties between the Cayman Islands and Jamaica and our hearts are with all those who have been affected by this incredibly powerful storm. As a reinsurance professional that has closely monitored Hurricanes for nearly 30 years, I was impressed by and grateful for the forecasters and their models in predicting both the erratic track and extreme intensity of Melissa. While property is fixed in place, people can get out of the way of the path of the storm with this information. The forecasters certainly saved many lives as a result. From a financial perspective, Melissa is a fourth quarter event it is early days, but we do not expect a significant loss to Greenlight Capital Re Given positioning in the CAT space and the fact that it missed the Southeastern United States, we have been confident that our underwriting portfolio is positioned to deliver a strong underwriting return, so it is encouraging to see that reflected in our results in Q3. Our open market book delivered an 84.5% combined ratio while our innovations book delivered a 96.7% combined ratio. Both segments showed meaningful premium growth. Growth in open market was driven by our funds at Lloyd's Book, modest property and financial lines growth offset by declines in casualty based on underwriting actions discussed last quarter. For our Innovation segment, a good portion of our accounts incept in the second half of the year and we can see evidence of previously anticipated organic top line growth beginning to emerge. Unfortunately, our investment performance for the quarter was a loss of $17.4 million. There are two main components of this Our investment in the Solus Glass Fund portfolio was down 3.2% in the quarter. David will provide more color in his remarks. In addition, we suffered a net unrealized loss of $11.3 million on our innovations investment portfolio. The net unrealized loss on our Innovations portfolio was primarily driven by a $16.4 million write down of our highest valued investment. Our innovation investments are generally illiquid and we revalue them as soon as we believe the valuation may be impaired or when a new funding round closes. This particular situation is idiosyncratic in that the lead investor was able to secure a new round of equity financing at a substantial discount due to a debt refinancing that fell through at the last minute. We still believe the company's prospects are bright and the financing removes an overhang from the investment. While this write down in Q3 is disappointing, I would highlight that we hold our Innovations investments for the long term and we are focused on realized gains and the associated underwriting and fee income opportunities generated from these investments rather than mark to market gains and losses. Further, this position was outsized from a carried value perspective due to prior upward adjustments based on previous financing rounds. Currently, we have no single investment valued at more than $10 million and only three investments valued at over $5 million. So the risk of a similar write down on a single investment going forward is mitigated absent an industry wide event. We are now focused on 1:1 renewals. While the market is clearly softening, we believe rates and terms will remain attractive for our open market reinsurance business. Consequently, we expect to renew most of our non casualty business and perhaps grow somewhat. As noted previously, our Innovations book is less susceptible to the supply demand pressures of the reinsurance. We anticipate continued strong organic growth from our existing Innovations clients and attractive new business opportunities. Now I'd like to turn the call over to David.

David Einhorn - Chairman of the Board - (00:07:16)

Thanks Greg and good morning everyone. The Solus Glass Fund Fund returned negative 3.2% in the third quarter. Long portfolio and macro contributed 1.7% and 3.3% respectively, and the short portfolio detracted 8.1% during the quarter. The S&P 500 index advanced 8.1%. The largest positive contributors were long investments in Gold, Greenbrick Partners and Core Natural Resources. The largest detractors included a short position in a profitless financial services company, a short basket of homebuilder stocks, and our long position in Kyndryl Holdings. Gold was the largest positive contributor as its price rose 17% over the quarter. Greenbrick Partners shares also advanced 17% during the quarter as the market's expectation for lower rates lifted. Homebuilder Stocks While the company continues to execute well on its regionally focused strategy, we remain cautious on the broader housing market and have maintained a nearly fully hedged position by shorting a basket of national homebuilders. This hedge basket offset most of Greenbric's positive contribution during the quarter. Core Natural resources shares advanced 20% during the quarter, recouping some of its decline from the first half of the year. The company announced significantly improved quarterly results, including an increase in free cash flow. Core used the majority of this cash flow to repurchase shares under the $1 billion share buyback program it announced earlier in the year after successfully completing its merger with Arch Resour. In addition to the homebuilder hedge basket, the largest detractors for the quarter included a short position in a profitless financial services company that transitioned from a near term bankruptcy candidate to a meme stock and our long port position in Kyndryl Holdings. Kyndryl shares declined 28% during the quarter, giving back some gains after the company posted a less exciting quarterly update than it's previously recent couple of quarterly results. Earlier in the year we established a new large position in a stub created by being Long Fluor Corporation and shortened new scale power. More recently we established a new medium sized position in Pacific Gas and Electric. Fluor is a global engineering construction company. In the spring, Fluor experienced a slowdown in capital spending from its customers due to tariff uncertainty, which we expect to reverse and for the business to return to growth in 2026 away from its core business. Fluor holds approximately a 40% stake in NuScale Power, a small modular nuclear reactor company. Fluor's stake is worth nearly $5 billion pre tax, which represents over 60% of its market cap. Fluor has announced plans to divest its holding and use a significant portion of the proceeds toward share buybacks. Pacific Gas and Electric is a California based regulated utility that transmits and distributes electricity and natural gas. While the company was not exposed to January's catastrophic LA wildfires, its earnings multiple collapsed to below 10 times. On concerns that the California Wildfire Fund, an important defense against wildfire related damage, claims that it shares with Edison International will be depleted, we invested with a view that the legislature is likely to put in place funding support and make further wildfire risk reform a priority. We have since seen progress in these initiatives and expect PGE to RE rate closer to the nearly 18 times average peer multiple. In our view that outside of the boom surrounding a handful of AI and AI adjacent companies, most of the rest of the economy is floundering. In the midst of this excitement, we are simply not comfortable underwriting a long investments or within the AI ecosystem and have decided for the most part not to participate. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to make money on the long investments outside of this small cohort of stocks. Our net exposure ended the quarter at about 25%, up from about 2% at the end of the second quarter. Solids glass returned 1.6% in October, bringing the year to date return to 1.2%. Net exposure in the investment portfolio was approximately 20% at the end of October. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Farmars to discuss the financial results in more detail.

Farmars Romer - (00:11:51)

Thank you David Good morning everyone. During the third quarter of 2025, Greenlight Re reported a net loss of $4.4 million or negative $0.13 per diluted share compared to a net income of 35.2 million or $1.01per diluted share. During the third quarter of 2024. The total underwriting income was 22.3 million, resulting in a combined ratio of 86.6% which was 9.3 points better than the same period last year. This included eight points of improvement due to lack of CAT losses in the quarter and six points of improvement related to underlying current year attritional loss ratio. We had 50 basis points of reserve development during the quarter compared to 3.7 points of reserve releases in the third quarter of last year. Our net investment loss was 17.4 million compared to 30.3 million of investment income in the third quarter of 2024. As Greg mentioned, most of the investment losses related to Solus Glass Fund and innovations. However, these losses were partially offset by other investment and interest income of 8.9 million. I will now break down the third quarter results by segment starting with the open market segment. The open market segment reported a pre tax income of 27.9 million composed of underwriting income of 22.2 million and investment income of 5.6 million. For the quarter, the open market segment grew net written premiums by 9.5% to 140.4 million while net earned premiums grew by 14.1%. The increase was driven primarily from growth in the funds at Lloyd's business and the financial, property and specialty lines from a combination of new programs and growth in underlying premium volume on renewing programs. These were offset by the casualty premiums decreasing during the quarter as a result of our decision earlier this year to non renew most of the open market casualty book. The open market combined ratio for the third quarter improved by 10 points to 84.5% compared to 94.5% for the same period in 2024. The lower loss ratio and a lower acquisition ratio contributed to the improved combined ratio. The current year loss ratio improved by 11.8 points driven by 8.3 point improvement in attritional losses and 3.5 point improvement in event losses. The segment reported a small prior year adverse loss development of 0.9 million or 60 basis points compared to favorable reserve releases of 5.3 million or 4.2 loss ratio points in the same quarter. Last, the acquisition cost ratio and the expense ratio improved 2.5% and 0.3% respectively on the back of higher earned premiums. Overall, the open market segment had a strong performance for the quarter. Now let's turn to the Innovation segment. The innovation segment grew net written premiums by 57.5% to $22.3 million during the quarter. The increase was mainly driven by Syndicate 3456 financial lines, partially offset by the increase in ceded premiums under the Innovations whole account retro program. Compared to the third quarter of last year, net earned premiums decreased by 0.8 million, mainly driven by the increase in retroceded premiums compared to the same quarter last year. The combined ratio for innovation segment was 96.7% during the third quarter compared to 93.6% in Q3 last year.

UNKNOWN - (00:16:25)

Year.

Farmars Romer - (00:16:26)

The composite ratio improved by 1 point to 87.1% favorable prior year reserve development contributed 3.1 points to the combined ratio compared to unfavorable development of 0.4 points in the third quarter of 2024. Compared to the same quarter last year, the expense ratio for the innovation segment was 9.6% compared to 5.5%. Due to a combination of growth in personnel and an increase in non payroll related costs for this segment, we are investing in this business in preparation for higher future premiums leading to the higher expense ratio. We expect this to normalize as we scale this segment. While the Innovation segment produced an underwriting income of $0.7 million, the investment impairment that Greg mentioned led to an overall net loss of 11.3 million for the segment. Now I would like to make a couple of quick points on capital and debt management. During the first nine months of 2025, we have repurchased 512,000 shares for $7 million which has been accretive to our book value per share. At the end of the third quarter of 2025, our fully diluted book value per share was $18.90, an increase of 5.3% year to date. During the quarter, we refinanced our term loan, replacing it with a five year $50 million revolving line of credit. As of the end of the third quarter, we reduced our debt leverage ratio down to 5.3% from 9.5% at the beginning of the year. Subsequently, in October we repaid an additional 15 million and currently have 20 million of debt outstanding. We have also entered into a letter of credit facility with Citibank exclusively for our funds at Lloyd's business. In October, we issued an LLC for 45 million pounds to Lloyd's and Lloyd's simultaneously released $60.7 million of cash which we had previously provided for funds at Lloyds. The new revolving line of credit and the new Funds at Lloyds letter of credit facility provides us added flexibility to optimize our cash management while further strengthening our balance sheet and improving our return on equity. That concludes our prepared remarks. The operator will now open the line for your questions.

OPERATOR - (00:19:20)

Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to be placed into the question queue, please press star1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you'd like to move your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Once again, that Star one to be placed in the question queue. Our first Question is coming from Ben Olesh from WA Capital. Your line is now live.

Ben Olesh - (00:19:54)

Yes, hello. Thank you for taking my question. This is a question to David. Could you please provide an update on the macro part of the Solus Glass Fund? What is your view and your position regarding to US Dollar gold and short term interest? Thank you.

David Einhorn - Chairman of the Board - (00:20:15)

Sure. Thanks for the question. We've maintained a core position in gold that now goes back pretty much to the near the inception of the company. Certainly since the IPO of the company. The gold is structured in two different components. One is physical gold, which we consider to just sort of be the core position that we occasionally trade around. Additionally, we buy binary digital options that you know are call options on rapid appreciation in gold. And those actually proved to be successful in the third quarter. And also in our October result. We from an interest rate perspective, our position is that we are long SOFR futures out into 2026, which is essentially a view that the Fed will reduce interest rates more than the market currently expects. And finally, we maintain inflation swaps which are a view that reported inflation over the next two, five and 10 years will be larger than the amount that the market has priced in.

Ben Olesh - (00:21:49)

Thank you.

OPERATOR - (00:21:49)

Our next question today is coming from Daniel DeYoung, a private investor.

Daniel DeYoung - (00:21:52)

Your line is now live. Hi.

David Einhorn - Chairman of the Board - (00:21:56)

Thanks for taking the question. This is more of a long term question for David. I believe a few years ago you evaluated the future of the company and one of the options considered given the discount to book value was closing the company. With all the work put into the company since and seven years in a row of positive investment performance at least year to date, do you see a long term future for the company? Also, investors like Howard Marks and Warren Buffett work well past regular retirement age. Could you see yourself doing that? Yeah, look, I think that the company, and we expressed this at last year's investor presentation, I actually think that the company has made enough structural improvement that we should be earning a return on equity that is greater than our cost of equity. And I believe that the shares should actually justifiably trade it at or above book value. As a result, it's been frustrating to us and everybody around that the shares continue to trade at a discount. But I don't believe that the solution is to liquidate the company. Were we to liquidate the company, there also would be substantial expenses that I could not quantify for you because we haven't done the exercise. But it would be unlikely that we would recognize like the full book value in a liquidation were we to go through with with that regarding my longevity. I'm presently 56 years old, and I expect to be doing this for a substantial additional amount of time. Thank you. Thank you.

Daniel DeYoung - (00:23:35)

Sure.

OPERATOR - (00:23:36)

Thank you. We reached the end of our question and answer session, and that does conclude today's teleconference and webcast. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.

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