Share count
190Mpeak FY2024
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ARX, Accelerant Holdings Class A
An insurance broker, paid a commission to place coverage without bearing the risk itself.
The business
What it sells, where the money comes from, the kind of company it is.
Revenue · FY2025
$913M
+51.5% YoY
Vital signs · TTM
Cash & investments $1.5B
The business in brief
read the 10-K →What this business is and what moves its needle, from its own SEC filings.
- Situation
- Unprofitable. No sustained operating profit across the record; an earnings multiple has nothing to rest on. What the record does show is revenue, the gross-margin trajectory, and the burn against the cash on hand.
- What moves the needle
- Commissions on the premiums it places, and organic growth. What decides it: insurance prices in the market, since it earns a slice of them; new business won and kept; and a capital-light fee stream that carries none of the underwriting risk of the insurers it sells for. On its own account, the filing leans hardest on customer concentration, set against the numbers in what the filing emphasizes, below.
- Is it a good business?
- Operating margin has been modest for a fee business (median −8%). It earns this on little capital, so return on equity has run near −98%, the leverage of a model that needs almost no plant to grow. A high return that does not fade can mark a moat, but whether the commissions keep renewing as rates turn is what the 10-K settles, not the multiple.
Every line is arithmetic on the company's filings, shown in full in the sections below.
Where the money comes from
read the 10-K →Revenue spreads across 2 regions, the largest North America at 51%.
Revenue by geography, FY2025
- North America51%$510M
- UK and EU40%$403M
From the segment footnote of the company's own 10-K. Shares are of total revenue; the profit bar shows each segment's share of segment operating profit, before unallocated corporate costs.
The record
Ten years of arithmetic, read across the cycle.
The record, 2023–2025
realized figures from each filing · older years to the left| 2023’23 | 2024’24 | 2025’25 | TTMTTMMar 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Income statement | ||||
| $344M | $603M | $913M | $1.0B | RevenueRevenue |
| −8.3% | 6.0% | −153.5% | −140.3% | Operating marginOp. mgn |
| −14.2% | 4.5% | −156.1% | −142.5% | Net marginNet mgn |
| ($49M) | $27M | ($1.4B) | ($1.4B) | Net incomeNet inc. |
| Cash flow & returns | ||||
| — | 9% | -204% | -207% | Return on equityROE |
| — | 9% | −204% | −207% | Retained to equityRetained/eq |
| Balance sheet | ||||
| — | $6.1B | $8.3B | $8.6B | Total assetsAssets |
| $775M | $1.2B | $1.7B | $1.5B | Cash & investmentsCash+inv |
| — | $304M | $698M | $693M | Shareholders’ equityEquity |
| Per share | ||||
| 166M | 200M | 190M | 222M | Shares out (diluted)Shares |
| $2.08 | $3.02 | $4.80 | $4.54 | Revenue / shareRev/sh |
| $-0.29 | $0.14 | $-7.49 | $-6.47 | EPS (diluted)EPS |
| — | $1.52 | $3.67 | $3.12 | Book value / shareBVPS |
The record, charted
FY2023–2025Each measure over its full record; the current point and the worst year marked.
Revenue
$913Mlow FY2023
Quality & stewardship
Returns, the balance sheet, capital allocation, and pay.
Owner’s Scorecard
FY2025 10-K · source on SEC EDGAR →
Is it a good business?
- Operating margin −153.5%Thin for a fee businessOperating income ($1.4B) ÷ revenue $913MIndustry peers: median 16%
What this means
The heart of a insurance broker: how much of each fee dollar survives the cost of running the business. Commissions are a slice of the premiums it places, earned without taking the underwriting risk itself, so it is a capital-light fee stream that rises with new business, retention and the price of insurance. A high margin held for years, through a market it does not control, is the operational mark of a real franchise.
- Net margin −156.1%SlimNet income ($1.4B) ÷ revenue $913M
What this means
What reaches the owner after tax and interest. For a capital-light fee business this should be a wide share of revenue; when it is thin despite a high operating margin, debt taken on for acquisitions is usually the reason, so read it next to the balance sheet.
- Return on equity −204%Below the cost of equityNet income ($1.4B) ÷ equity $698MIndustry peers: median 20%
What this means
Because the business ties up little capital, a healthy fee stream throws off a high return on the equity behind it. Read it with the buyback record: returning capital lifts this ratio honestly, but heavy debt taken to do so can flatter it.
Does AI threaten the moat?
Low contestabilityThe moat is physical, regulated or balance-sheet-funded, the kind AI cuts costs within but does not contest.
In its own filing Named as a competitive risk
Its FY2025 10-K names artificial intelligence as a competitive threat.
“Our future success depends, in significant part, on our ability to anticipate and effectively respond to the threats and opportunities presented by digital disruption, "big data," data analytics, AI and other developments in technology, particularly in the insurance industry.”
AI is unlikely to contest a moat that is physical, regulated or balance-sheet-funded; here it reads more as a cost tool than a threat, and the company is using it that way.
Read from the filing's own risk factors, paired with the industry's structure under its SIC code; the durability is read above, the price below.
All figures as filed; the source filing is linked above.
Management, ownership & pay
From the proxy: how much of the business the people running it own, and how they are paid.
- Stock-based compensation$43M
The slice of the business handed to employees in shares this year, 5% of revenue. Buffett's oldest accounting fight: this is compensation, compensation is an expense, real whether or not the headline earnings admit it. One trap: the cash-flow statement adds SBC back, so the operating cash, and the owner earnings drawn from it, are flattered by exactly this amount; counted as the cost it is, what an owner keeps is lower.
What an owner would ask, FY2025
read the 10-K →- Which reported numbers are a judgment call?Management names Income taxes, Insurance reserves as critical estimates
each rests partly on management's judgment; the filing's note sets out the assumptionsverify →
The questions the record and the charts do not answer on their own; each carries the figure and the place to look.
Peers, Insurance Brokers
The same industry, side by side on fee margins. Each figure is a through-cycle median, so a peak or trough year can’t distort it; the group median at the foot is the line to read each against.
| Company | Revenue | Op. margin | Net margin | ROE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RYANRyan Specialty Holdings Inc. | $3.0B | 16.5% | 3.9% | 11% |
| BWINThe Baldwin Insurance Group Inc. | $1.5B | -3.2% | -4.3% | -6% |
| ACTEnact Holdings Inc. | $1.2B | 77.3% | 57.3% | 14% |
| CRVLCorVel Corp. | $959M | 11.2% | 8.8% | 26% |
| ARXAccelerant Holdings Class A | $913M | -8.3% | -14.2% | -204% |
| HGTYHagerty Inc. | $678M | 4.0% | 7.2% | 52% |
| LIFEEthos Technologies Inc. | $388M | 18.8% | 18.4% | — |
| GSHDGoosehead Insurance | $365M | 17.0% | 3.6% | 51% |
| Group median | — | 13.9% | 5.5% | 14% |
The price
What a price has to assume.
What the price implies
reverse-DCFThe owner-earnings base could not be formed from this filing’s tagged data (operating cash flow or capital spending is missing), so the owner-earnings reverse-DCF has no base to grow. We read the price from both ends instead: type a price to see the profitability it demands, then set the mature margin you would believe and weigh the two against each other. Nothing leaves your browser unless you enter it in your notebook.
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The assumptions
Enter a price to run it.
Owner earnings it must reach—
Margin the price demands—
Owner-earnings margin today—
A dated snapshot of the price you typed, the assumptions you set, and what the page showed for them. A snapshot is never edited after it is saved. Your notebook is yours alone — the commitment states what is stored and what we will never do.
Two reads of one future. From your price: the owner earnings the company must reach, valued at a mature multiple and discounted back at your rate, expressed as the margin it implies on revenue grown at your rate. From your belief: the mature margin you would credit, set on the dial above. When the margin the price demands runs above the one you would believe, you are paying for a future taken on faith. For a deep cyclical at a trough, normalized through-cycle earnings are the better lens; this mode is for the genuinely unprofitable, and for the profitable business whose capital spending currently outruns its cash.
Cite: Owner Scorecard, "Accelerant Holdings Class A (ARX), the owner's record," https://ownerscorecard.com/c/ARX, data as of 2026-07-09.
Manual order: ← ARWR its page in the Manual ASAN →
Industry order: ← AON the Insurance Brokers chapter BRO →