Morning, folks. I'm Morgan Davis, the Chairman of White Mountains, and I wanna welcome you all to this session. Delighted that you're here and have interest in our company. My job is to introduce the directors and then turn it over to Manning, who will tell you all about White Mountains. We have some of our directors here. Unfortunately, a couple of them couldn't make it, but we have Pete Carlson. Pete is with MiMedx as the CFO. He has extensive accounting and auditing background. He's the chairman of our audit committee. Next to Pete is Mary Choski. She has extensive. Let me check my notes here so I don't muck it up. Extensive executive and board level service.
She's a founding partner of Strategic Investment Group and founder of Emerging Markets Management. Our newest director is Suzanne Shank, and we're pleased to welcome her, delighted to have her. She joined us in October of 2021, and she's the President and CEO, co-founder of Siebert Williams Shank & Co., LLC, a full service investment banking and financial operation. We have at the end of the row there, David Tanner. Tanner is also our Deputy Chairman, and he has extensive board level service and private equity financial experience. He's the Managing Director of Three Mile Capital LLC, previously Managing Director of Quadrangle Group LLC and former Executive Vice President of Continental Grain Company, founder and managing principal of Quadrangle Group LLC. The two directors that are not here, Margie Dillon, she has extensive insurance background.
She was previously the Chief Customer Officer for Liberty Mutual and Chief Financial Officer for Liberty's Personal Lines operation. Phil Gelston, former partner at Cravath, has deep legal and management experience, and he's the chair of our comp and nominating committee. You will note we've had a little bit of board refreshment since we met the last time. I'm very pleased with some of our new directors, and I think we have a very competent, able, qualified board that all seems to work together well. You as shareholders, I think, should be very proud of the group that we've assembled. That's your board of directors, and we're glad you're here.
There was one other thing I wanted to do before I turned it over to Manning, and that's to find out who is our longest tenured shareholder here. Is there anybody here with us today that has owned the stock for, say, more than 20 years? Oh, we got a couple of hands in the room. Well, Dave Staples put his hand up. Yes, sir. When did you join us as a-
Year 2000.
Excellent. All right.
My firm since the 50's, 80's.
Eighties. Well, you're gonna win the prize for the longest tenured, but,
It's not me personally.
Well.
It's my firm.
Well, we're excited you guys have stuck with us through all the changes, and we're glad you're here. Manning Rountree, our CEO, is also on the board. I should have introduced him as a board member, and he's been with the company since 2004, and we're delighted with the job he's doing. I will turn it over to Manning. The floor is yours.
Thank you, Morgan. Welcome, everybody. It's sort of hard to believe it's been three years since we've done this in person. As many of you know, my wife is an expert in pandemics and vaccine development, so it's been a busy three years in our house. When the pandemic hit, my son said to her, "Mom, congratulations. This is your time to shine. You have one minute." You know, that one minute has turned into three years, and it's been a long run for us, and we're glad we're finally back doing this in the old-fashioned way that we always have. Welcome to everybody. I'm gonna also welcome the senior team of White Mountains. I'm not gonna introduce each of them to you today, but they're here. Please talk with them afterwards if you'd like.
I'm gonna introduce the senior teams of the operating companies as we go. You get a chance to ask Q&A during the session and also afterwards if you'd like. I do wanna call out a few key management changes that have happened since the last time we were here. The first is Reid Campbell, who's been with us for more than 25 years, stepped down from the role of CFO in March, and he's assumed the role of president. In that role, he's essentially doing everything he's always done, except for K's and Q's. We look forward to working with Reid in that capacity for at least a couple more years. Liam Caffrey, to my left, joined us as CFO effective on March 1. Liam is gonna be new for this group, so please introduce yourselves.
Liam spent 10 years at McKinsey & Company and then nine at Aon, where he was most recently CEO of Aon Affinity and Global CFO of Aon Risk Solutions. He brings a lot of experience, a lot of leadership to the senior team. Let me just assure everybody that the finance function is in great hands. Third, this will be relevant, I think, to all shareholders, we said goodbye to Todd Pozefsky, who has announced his retirement last year. You all know him in his role as the head of investor relations, but he's just a jack of all trades and the busiest man in show business, and has contributed all over the company for many years, and we're really gonna miss him.
So far, you know, he's working with us on a consulting basis for the next couple of years, and so far he's spending most of his retirement in the Guilford office. That's a good situation. Rob Seelig, who's here, who's our longtime general counsel in the back, who many of you know as well, has picked up investor relations and will be your point person going forwards. Finally, I wanna welcome back two executives to White Mountains, Mike Papamichael, in the role of Deputy CFO. Mike, if you could raise your hand. Keith Milne, who's joined the corporate development and M&A team in Hanover. Mike and Keith grew up in the White Mountains family. In fact, Keith's first job, he had a desk jammed into my office 'cause we didn't have a space for him.
They're rejoining from Hamilton and Sirius respectively, and they're strong young executives with insurance chops and horsepower, and we welcome them back. All right. Lastly, I would note, as I do every year, that each member of the senior team at White Mountains is a White Mountains shareholder, and in most cases, hold shares worth many multiples of his or her salary. I can assure you that every member of this team thinks like an owner and works relentlessly in pursuit of shareholder value. All right. A word on format. We're gonna change things up a little bit this year because there have been some significant developments in the first half of the year. We're gonna cover those first.
We're gonna give you a chance for Q&A, and then we'll circle back and do a full rundown of the operating businesses with a focus on 2021 results. All right. Let's get started. All right. Three key developments in the first half of 2022. We announced the sale of NSM. We closed and funded a new debt facility at HG Global, and we closed and funded a new equity capital raise at Kudu. The bottom line impact from these three deals is an increase of $282 per share in adjusted book value and an increase in undeployed capital of $1.004 billion. This is big in the aggregate. Each of these transactions represents a milestone of sorts for the three businesses involved, and we'll talk about those. All right. First, NSM.
In May, we announced the sale to Carlyle for $1.775 billion. The deal will generate a gain on sale of $830 million. The multiple on invested capital is about 2.7, and the IRR is about 31% over about four years. A successful outcome. Closing the chapter on the NSM investment is bittersweet. We've really enjoyed working with the guys at NSM, and I think the partnership has been a strong one, and Geof will talk to that in a minute. What made this investment work? When I reflect on it, we bought it at a fair price. It wasn't a cheap price, it wasn't a dear price, it was a fair price. We aligned ourselves well with a management team who really had something to prove.
Then we tried to help them or at a minimum, get out of the way while they went about proving it, or their organic growth was, I think, in the high single digits, low double digits, sort of across the span of our investment. Not everything worked all the time. We had hiccups in different places, but the diversification of verticals helped. When you blended it all up, it was a nice, steady underlying growth. We worked with management to do six roll-up transactions. I would say we had one three-pitch strikeout, two home runs and three base hits. When you look at that in terms of how it rolled up into value creation, it was significant. Finally, we got some multiple expansion on our exit, which was nice to see.
I've talked to most shareholders about this deal at one point or another, and nobody questions, "Why did you sell on these terms?" Because the result, I think, speaks for itself. I do get asked, "Why'd you sell at all? You know, this is a nice little business. Why not hold it and mature it and grow it?" There's no deductive answer to that. In the end, when I reflect on it, I think the NSM guys agree this was a compelling transaction, and it was a deal that was too good to refuse, and we didn't refuse it. All right. Let me stop there, and I wanna ask Geof McKernan, CEO and Founder of NSM. I'll also introduce Bill McKernan, President of NSM, and I'll ask Geof to come and say a few words and take a bow.
Thanks, man.
Yeah.
Appreciate it.
Wherever you like.
Good morning, thank you. Manning, my name is Geof McKernan, founder and CEO of NSM. I first wanna say thanks to Manning and Morgan, Reid, Krystle Haney. These folks worked with us very diligently over the last four years to make NSM what it is today. That's not lip service. I like to tell a funny story. When we first started with White Mountains, Morgan, Reid, Manning, Chris came down, and our culture was about face-to-face, understanding people and making sure we got a capital partner that can help us do that. Bill and I sat in a conference room with Manning, with Morgan, with Reid and Chris, and in three hours we had a handshake deal. That is the essence of how we worked the business. It was face-to-face. It was picking up the phone call and getting things done.
When we reflect upon that, when we first started the business, you know, we needed a lot of structure, and we wanted to invest a lot in the business. What White Mountains did for us, they allowed us to invest in the business, and they also mentored us on how to be a good business. For that, we thank you very much. As Manning said, you know, they allowed us to do what we do best, which is grow our businesses, find the right niches and grow. They were also, Manning was personally a mentor to Billy and I on how to run a bigger business. That's why the business has grown the way it is, because we put a lot of structure around it, and that is what we needed.
That is why we got the high multiple, because when we did the process, everybody looked at our numbers and how we did and said, "Hey, this is a really solid business. There's no gaps. There's no questions." Everything was buttoned up. If you're in the M&A world, you see a lot of businesses that aren't buttoned up. That's why the transaction got the multiple, and that's why we had the competitive nature, because we had a lot of people who wanted our business. Manning allowed us to pick our partner and do the right things. Thank you.
Thank you.
Let me open for questions for Geof or me. Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, let's move on. Shifting gears. HG Global BAM. In April, HG Global closed and funded a new $150 million investment grade rated senior debt facility. Of that amount, $116 million made its way back up to White Mountains' parent company in cash, which reduces our equity capital commitment to HG BAM dollar for dollar. Why is this deal important? First and foremost, it demonstrates the continued financial progress of HGG and BAM. We'll cover this more in the BAM section later on in the presentation. In short, we've had five consecutive years of increasing cash flow coming through the HGG system. In total, HGG has repaid almost $200 million of cash payments of surplus note P&I. The surplus note balances have come down considerably.
Strong financial progress for the segment. Second, this is a significant return of equity capital and probably the biggest return since we've been involved in the business for 11 years now, and that's important. Third, we think we can do this again down the road to the extent that the cash flow continues to build and grow in the system. Good deal at HG BAM. Let me ask if there are any questions on this deal. Okay, hearing none, let's shift gears again and talk about Kudu. In May, Kudu closed and funded a $114 million equity capital raise. MassMutual came in for $64 million for a 9.9% slice, and White Mountains contributed an incremental $50 million pari passu.
The key number here is 114, and not the first 114, but the second 114. The pre-money value for this equity capital raise was $114 million above the fair value of the go-forward Kudu portfolio. If you're analyzing, you know, Kudu, that's the key thing to focus on here. If that step up were fully realized, it would represent a gain in adjusted book value per share of upwards of $30 a share, but it is not fully realized. GAAP only recognizes the 9.9% slice acquired by MassMutual. The true impact, you know, will not come through yet. Why is this deal important? First of all, MassMutual is an ideal partner. In 2020, MassMutual became Kudu's lender when we closed a $300 million investment grade rated debt facility.
Now they're taking an equity slice. They're supportive of the business. They've got a long-term perspective, and they line up well with what we wanna do and what Kudu wants to do. We welcome as a partner in a new format, and we look forward to working with them. The other point is just to realize that Kudu's pipeline remains robust. It is striking how much demand there is for the kinds of capital solutions that Kudu provides. Rob and Charlie have done a great job positioning the business as the first call in their target market. Kudu wants to build a big business. There's every reason to think they can build a big business, and the capital support from MassMutual is more dry powder to help us do that.
Let me pause there and see if there are any questions on the Kudu deal. Okay, hearing none, I'm gonna introduce Liam, and he's gonna cover the financial implications of these three deals.
Thank you, Manning. Good morning. What I'd first like to do is, again, just summarize the overall impact from these three transactions that Manning described, then talk a little bit about implications for our financial position, and some of our recent performance. Again, as Manning described, two key metrics that we've been tracking. First, adjusted book value per share and then undeployed capital. In terms of adjusted book value per share, as Manning laid out, the main event is really the NSM sale. That will take us from where we ended 1Q at $1,204 per share, up by $280. HG Global transaction has no impact on book value. And then the Kudu transaction has a slight $2 per share increase.
Again, as Manning said, that's only on the 9.9% that we sold to MassMutual. Summarizing those three, we should have a pro forma adjusted book value per share of roughly $14.86, up from the $12.04, where we ended 1Q. In terms of undeployed capital, at the end of 1Q, we were at roughly $283 million in undeployed capital. The main event here is the $1.3 billion of proceeds from the NSM sale. $116 million represents the special dividend to White Mountains from the HG Global debt issuance. There's no impact here of the Kudu capital raise, and that's simply because we had already penciled that in in Q1.
The $50 million that we invested in Kudu alongside MassMutual is accounted for within the $283 million. If you're keeping score at home, at the end of Q1, we had cited $400 million of undeployed capital, which is the $283 million, and then that included the HG Global $116 million to get to that $400 million. But again, that $400 million, after the NSM sale, we anticipate being just shy of $1.7 billion. On the next slide, just put this in context a little bit of where we've been. If you'll recall back, in the beginning of 2017, we were fresh off the sale of OneBeacon, Sirius Group, and other transactions, so we had a little over $3 billion of undeployed capital.
What you saw is over the next 5 years, we diligently deployed that through a combination of about $1.5 billion returned to shareholders, then a little bit over $2 billion redeployed into investments such as NSM, Kudu, Ark, and others. By the end of last year, we were back to pretty much a fully deployed situation. We had about $300 million in undeployed capital, which is about our safety margin of where we like to keep so that we can be opportunistic in terms of transactions. Over that 5-year period, fully deployed. Now what you see with the sale of NSM is we're back into a position of having significant undeployed capital. Ultimately, this is a good problem to have. We think, you know, it's a good time to have dry powder in the market.
I think what you can expect from us over the medium term is a combination of returns to shareholders and redeployments, and we'll obviously evaluate those situations based on the best return to shareholders. To give you confidence, this is a playbook with which we are very familiar on how to put this capital to work. In summary on the next slide, just our financial position on a pro forma basis after the sale of NSM. We'll have a total capital base of about $5.2 billion. The vast majority of that, or $4.4 billion, is in common shareholders' equity. The remainder is in non-controlling interests and debt.
No debt at the parent level at this time, but we do employ prudent levels of leverage at several of our operating companies where it makes sense, notably Kudu, Ark, and now HG Global. Pro forma, after the sale of NSM, our debt-to-total capital ratio will be about 11%, so about $570 million of debt across the operating companies. As we've discussed, $1.7 billion of undeployed capital. For the right opportunity, we could potentially flex that upward, either through leverage associated with the deployment or leverage at the parent level, which we have not done recently, but we could. Again, significant dry powder and for the right opportunity could flex that. That's where we stand today. Next maybe I'd like to touch on a couple slides just on recent financial performance on some of our key metrics.
You look at the year in review, again, our main metric of what we try to track is adjusted book value per share, and our objective is to grow that and compound that over long periods of time. What this lays out is over the past 3.25 years, factoring in pro forma the impact of the NSM transaction, where we've been on that metric, and then how market value per share has tracked that. What you'll see, and I'll double-click on 2021 on the next page, but 2021 was a down year for us. Again, I'll provide some more color on that. But over the three-year period, we've grown adjusted book value per share at a compound annual rate of a little bit over 17%. We think that's a pretty good result.
You'll see over time, and we'll show this later, market value per share pretty directly tracks adjusted book value per share over time. Now again, we're somewhat zen about is this linear or is it lumpy? You know, we tend to just given the nature of our business, in particular transactions, our returns can be lumpy, and that's what you see here. But our focus is over that long term and medium term, having those metrics go up, and I think that's what you see here. Let me double-click on 2021 quickly. Again, 2021 headline number, adjusted book value per share down 5.7%. A primary driver of that was a mark-to-market decline in our investment, our remaining equity investment in MediaAlpha. Steve and Manning will touch on MediaAlpha in a little bit.
If you exclude MediaAlpha, we were up a little bit above 4% growth in adjusted book value per share, which is a good positive result and generally in line with our peers last year. You see in market value per share, we were up 1%. We clearly lagged the market last year. Now you look year to date, we're up a little bit over 22%, vastly exceeding the market. Again, we don't get exercised, you know, about any given quarter, any given year. We're trying to grow these metrics over time. You'll see with the positive developments we've discussed this year, far exceeding the market in terms of the growth in our share price, and we expect that to continue. Just a little bit of context there in terms of the overall picture.
What I'd like to do is turn it back over to Manning, and we'll go through with each of the operating company CEOs, some color around the buildup. Thanks.
Thank you. All right. Slide 16 gives you a breakdown of capital per share on the left before the deals that we talked about in the first half, and on the right afterwards. You can see on the right, undeployed capital surging into the lead again. That's a good problem to have, as Liam says, and we'll be working on that in the coming years. Next slide, please. This slide gives you a rundown of our key businesses going forward. There's 6 on the slide. I won't walk you through all of them, but I would make some observations on a few common themes. First of all, every business is in the insurance or a related financial services sector, and there are no exceptions to that. That's what we know. That's what we do.
Second, you can sorta see in the second column over, we tend to prefer controlled positions. True of four of our six investments today, and until the IPO, it was true of MediaAlpha as well. Really, Elementum is the exception to the rule there. Third, which you see in the third column over, our management teams of our operating companies that you're gonna hear from today are significant owners in their businesses, and there are no exceptions to that. All right, turning to Build America Mutual and HG Re Ltd. Please allow me to introduce Seán McCarthy, CEO and co-founder of Build America Mutual. And just a reminder, BAM is a financial guarantor of essential public purpose municipal bonds. That means bonds issued by states and local governments to build things like schools or utility projects.
BAM is a primary insurance company that faces the market, and it is a mutual company. It's owned by its member municipalities, the same people that use its insurance. HG Re, which is the primary entity owned by White Mountains, is a single-purpose, first loss reinsurance business, and it's a private stock company that we essentially own all of. White Mountains provided the formation capital to BAM through HG Re, and that included $500 million of surplus notes. Our economics come in two forms, the reinsurance profit we earn at HG Re and the interest that we earn on the surplus note repayment over time. 2021 at BAM was the second-best year on record, trailing only 2020.
The main event in 2021 was higher demand for bond insurance, which gets reflected in better penetration rates in the primary market. Penetration rates jumped in 2020 after the market volatility brought on by the COVID crisis, and then they have stayed elevated. And as a result, in 2021, we hit a new all-time high for par insured, which you can see here at $17.5 billion. On the other hand, pricing dipped a little bit in 2021, and there are a mix of reasons for that, some good, some bad. First, credit spreads for municipal bonds actually tightened in 2021, and that constrains the premiums that BAM can charge for its insurance.
On the other hand, in 2021, BAM wrote business with higher average credit quality, and that was intentional, and that explains why risk-adjusted pricing has remained strong even though total pricing has dipped a bit. Third, in 2021, secondary market activity was slow. That business has much higher pricing than primary business, and there was just less contribution in 2021 coming off that business. That has turned around in 2022 with a bullet for some reasons that Seán will describe. In 2021, BAM made $34 million of cash payments on surplus notes P&I. That's the fifth consecutive year of increasing payments. Of utmost importance, the portfolio of insured credits has performed very well. We've come through COVID with no biz payments. We've been extremely proactive in surveilling the portfolio, and we have no credits on the watch list.
Stepping back, we've been in the business now for 11 years, and we have zero credit losses to date, and that is the standard to which we are writing. One other note on first quarter, momentum remains strong and secondary market activity is picking up in particular. I think we will have our best first half on record by a wide margin. Slide 20. This gives you some basic facts on the market environment. You can see the insured penetration spiking in 2020 and staying high, which is important. You can see interest rates moving higher, but credit spreads not. I think everybody understands, but higher rates, wider spreads are good for BAM's business, everything else being equal. With the possible exception of credit spreads, we perceive some tailwinds here for BAM, that we have not had for some time.
All right, 2021 provides a financial snapshot. Few items. You can see all the themes we've already discussed, higher insured penetration, softer pricing, but good risk-adjusted pricing, slower secondary market activity in 2021, but bouncing back in 2022. Just a quick aside on the secondary market so everybody understands what we're talking about. We do get this question from shareholders. Secondary market activity means providing insurance on uninsured bonds that are already issued and held by institutional investors. It's a huge market. It's many multiples of the primary market. Institutional investors might seek that insurance for any number of reasons, including their own, you know, risk protection purposes. Those transactions tend to generate better total pricing for a whole bunch of reasons, while still delivering significant benefit to the investors. We intend to grow this business substantially, and the cons.
We're only really constrained by the number and quality of the ideas we can generate. There's as much business there as we could ever wanna write. Finally, on this slide, you can see the strong growth in claims-paying resources. BAM has ample capitalization and headroom to continue to grow. Finally, you can see the continued growth in HG Global's UPR. That's an important number. It represents the embedded reinsurance profit in the existing portfolio. If there are no credit losses, it will turn into profit dollar for dollar over time as the insured bonds mature. All right, let me pause there and invite Seán to share a few thoughts.
Thank you, Manning, and the entire White Mountains team. We are incredibly proud of our relationship with White Mountains, first and foremost, and as I say to our senior management team, our number one goal is to make White Mountains happy. We are entering our eleventh year, as Manning had said, in the business. For the first nine years, really, we had headwinds of decreasing interest rates and then tighter credit spreads. The market environment right now, really starting at the end of 2021, is positive for BAM and for the industry. Higher interest rates are happening as a transition. Ultimately, credit spreads are widening, and there's more volatility.
Today, for example, the inflation number of 8.6 will create further volatility in the markets. In the first 10 years of BAM, underwrote a hundred and ten billion dollars worth of transactions, $92 billion are in force. We are muni only. Our portfolio has an average rating of A. It is diverse by geography, by sector, by revenue type. As Manning had pointed out, and what we're particularly proud of, is that we have had no payment defaults. That's really because we stick to essential public purpose municipal finance only. Overall, as Manning had also pointed out, utilization is up. It's right now at about 8.8% of the total municipal bond market. Compare that to 2019, where it was 5.9%.
That growth for BAM particularly comes from higher credit quality of our book. If you think about this year, for example, year to date, 25% of the par that we have guaranteed is double-A by either Standard & Poor's or Moody's as an underlying rating. This year to date, we have underwritten 25 new transactions that are over $50 million in size and one that we did for DASNY of $650 million, which is a compilation of a number of other transactions. What are our current strategies? There are two parts and Manning also referred to this.
Our business can be divided into the primary market, which is new issuance of new money transactions or refinancing transactions, and secondary market business, which is defined as us putting our guarantee or wrap on a bond that's uninsured and outstanding. These businesses are complementary. Last year, there was a tremendous volume of new issuance in the market, and that meant that institutional investors that are looking at the business prospects, they're so busy trying to put those new issues to bed, they're not spending any time trying to make money in the secondary market. Those businesses sort of are complementary in that way. When the volume is down in the primary market, activity in the secondary market increases. Net net, since our inception, these two efforts have been complementary.
Now, how do I think about the scope of these markets? Well, in the primary market, we have a competitor. We share savings of our guarantee. Nobody uses financial guarantee insurance if they don't save money for the issuer. Think about that as a cup of water. Some years it's a bigger cup, some years it's a smaller cup, but roughly about $400 billion worth of transactions come a year in the overall market. The secondary market has $4 trillion of uninsured bonds outstanding. That's like a swimming pool of water. For us, we look to mine, create ideas, suggest them to institutional investors. Put our guarantee on that. We get a better return for doing that. The strength of our ideas, we sort of are conspiring with our counterparties to make money. They like that.
That business has really been performing very well over time. You think about our business as an outlook. Right now, we think that volatility is gonna continue, and we think sort of in the intermediate part of our market, this will be higher interest rates. You can see credit spreads continue to tighten through the first quarter, but at the end of the day, they're now starting to widen. People are worried about whether there's going to be a recession. There's a recession that brings back credit worries in the market. We, as Manning had pointed out during the entire COVID experience, we monitored credits that had potential exposure to their revenue streams being threatened by COVID, hotel occupancy and taxes, convention centers, things like that, as a good example.
We worked with our issuers, their bankers and financial advisors, and had no defaults. What are we planning to do? We're increasing utilization. Our efforts, both in institutional counterparties have expanded dramatically over the last several years. We're exploring avenues to try to distribute our financial guarantee on a more retail basis that has potential as well. It boils down to this: We expect the first half of this year. I can't tell you what will happen in the second half, as markets are changing, and they are volatile, but we expect that we will have a record first half without any other one-off transactions embedded in that since the inception of the company. Thank you.
Let's pause there and open up for questions on BAM and HG. Yeah, please.
Guy Carpenter from Greenlight Capital Re. Just a couple of questions. Why did you set this up as a mutual insurance?
You have to go back to what happened in the Great Recession. It turns out that no companies went under. There were nine primary triple-A insurance companies that guaranteed that were financial guarantors. The vast majority of them went under. The reason they went under was because there was this sort of conflict of interest between policyholder and shareholder interests. The issue really came down to the fact that they took bigger risks than they could underwrite, made famous in the movie The Big Short. At our former company, we never underwrote that business.
The bottom line of that was that we decided that a mutual insurance company was a way to avoid some of the issues that had happened at the time of the great crisis. Also, it's a lower cost model. Our members are very happy with the value that they get from our guarantee the day they price their bonds. We provide other ancillary services. For example, we write a credit profile, which is a summary, not a rating, of every transaction we do, available for free on our website. We also provide Green Star, where bonds qualify for a green standard. We provide that as a service to the market, and we think that's going to be a demand pull going forward.
The long and short of it is we think this is a better model for muni only. We think institutional investors and retail investors are comfortable with the fact that they are not sharing risks with other complicated transactions that they may or may not understand, and that we can deliver our services and then focus on delivering an appropriate return to White Mountains, frankly, who provided our seed capital.
Just to add, amplify one point, which Seán touched on from a pure White Mountains perspective. You know, the BAM enterprise is a capital-intensive endeavor, and the initial formation capital has to come from somewhere. It came from us. But over time, it's being replaced gradually by retained earnings at BAM and by policyholder surplus that's being built up in the mutual. That policyholder surplus has a relatively low cost of capital. So there's embedded leverage, and over time in returns to White Mountains through that structure.
Just a quick second question.
Sure.
Which is, let's say you insure credit in the secondary or the primary market and you're observing a deterioration, or you're worried about something, an issue that you've insured. What actions can you take? Can you lay off the risk? Can you reinsure it? What is your recourse when you become concerned about something that you've insured?
Good question. First of all, when we guarantee a transaction, it's marriage in the old-fashioned way, no prospect for a divorce. Our guarantee is there to make timely payment of principal and interest when due until the last bond payment is made. We have a robust surveillance group, and we constantly monitor every transaction. In fact, our database is one that from deal inquiry to financial reporting, gathers every piece of information we gather. When we're monitoring credits, we update their financial profile every year, and again, as I said, put that in a credit profile. We reach out when we think a credit has an issue.
Good example was in COVID, where there were a number of transactions, for example, San Antonio Convention Center, that we had some exposure to on a transaction that we've done. We worked with them to make sure that they could make their payments and structure themselves, and ultimately, they refinanced that transaction. The key is that we have, because the vast majority of what we guarantee are fixed rate bonds, the average life of these transactions is over 17 years, they have a final maturity of 30, that there's no acceleration of our obligation. Again, we're also never antithetical, which is, I think, what happened in the great crisis, we're on the same side. Municipalities want to pay their debt, and so we work with them in ways, far in advance of where there would be a probable default.
Another point to that issue is that many, many of our transactions have a debt service reserve fund. What's that? That is a cash inside the transaction that is usually sized at one year's maximum annual debt service. It gives a cushion before we get to a point where we have to make a payment.
Good answer. I think the only thing I would add is that it's the overwhelming majority of missed payments are foot faults in the municipal debt world, where a trustee has forgotten to send the cash. We do a good job, I think, of staying out in front of the foot faults.
It's a good way to describe it. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Seán. All right. Let's now turn to our newest operating business, which is Ark. Please allow me to introduce Ian Beaton, CEO and co-founder of Ark, and Nick Bonnar, Chief Underwriting Officer and co-founder of Ark. Ark is a property and casualty underwriting business. Our investment in Ark marked a return to that business for White Mountains, which has been our historical bread and butter. Ian and Nick founded the business in 2007 with private equity backing and then did an MBO a number of years later. In 2021, our transaction with Ian and Nick conferred a control stake to White Mountains via a scale-up transaction in which we injected roughly $600 million of incremental equity capital.
Their willingness to confer control and our willingness to inject that kind of money into this business, I think, speaks volumes about our collective view of the market opportunity, the opportunity that's in front of us. Ark's roots are at Lloyd's, and it remains Lloyd-centric, but we've stood up a Bermuda platform, and we expect that platform will grow over time. Slide 23. This is a bragging slide. This, as it demonstrates, Ark has consistently produced top quartile underwriting results with high profitability and low volatility. We feel very comfortable and confident that our underwriting capital is being stewarded by Ian and Nick, who we see as among the best in the business. There are two other things that give me great comfort, and I think should give you great comfort around our investment in Ark.
First of all, Ian and Nick have walked the walk in the past over the course of underwriting cycles and grown and shrunk the top line in the right ways in response to underwriting availability and bottom-line results. Second, Ian and Nick maintain substantial hard equity capital ownership of this business, and that's really key. In contrast to many purely professional management teams in this business who are really rolling the dice on the ups, Ian and Nick are true owners of their business, and they own both the upside and the downside here. All right, 2024. Ark is off to a good start. First of all, the execution at the outset of our relationship was really exceptional. We signed a deal in August of 2020. Well, actually, our first real contact around the deal was August 10.
Signed a deal on October first, closed the deal on January first. During that time, nobody ever met in person, which is pretty remarkable. In fact, we saw Ian and Nick for the first time last month in almost three years, and they were instantly filled with regret. Ark achieved a flat A rating from Best, which was the highest rating in the class of 2020. Ark had all of its underwriting platforms up and running and people in place for the 1/1 renewals of 2021, and that sounds mundane, but it's really not. That was an incredible feat, and it was key to the financial result in 2021.
During 2021, we completed a capital raise, placing $163 million of subordinated debt, releasing a call on $200 million of incremental White Mountains capital, equity capital, and essentially optimizing the capital structure for now. Results were strong in 2021. The combined ratio was 85%, which translates to an ROE of 12 or 13. Premium levels were up almost 80% year-over-year with good, healthy rate improvement. The results in first quarter of 2022 are also encouraging. The combined ratio is up a bit at 101, largely driven by losses we took in connection with the Ukraine conflict.
On the other hand, premiums are up again strongly, almost 60% year-over-year and still with incremental healthy rate improvement. Notwithstanding the losses on Ukraine, our plan for full year 2022 is unchanged, and we expect to exceed $1.3 billion while maintaining our target underwriting returns. Slide 25. This just gives you a visual of the direction of travel in Ark's business. Strong premium growth, good combined ratio outcome in 2021. Slightly elevated in 2022, but we expect that to trend back down over the course of the year. I'll pause there, and I'll introduce Ian to give us a few words. Do you want this?
Sure. Good morning. Thank you for having me. It's been a rapid 18 months with White Mountains. We're 15 years old in reality. I mean, Nick looks probably nearer 50 years old, let's be polite about it. Ark's 15 years old now, and we've spent the last 10% of our life in the White Mountains fold, and it's been a great journey. We had been waiting for several years for the market to turn, and we had been shrinking our business, shrinking the top line in order to get ready for growing the top line when it came. When 2019 came around and the market started to turn, we thought now is the time to grow.
It was remarkable, we managed to transact, get the deal across the line remotely, just dealing with Manning, who had begun to believe was actually just a small blue square on Zoom and actually wasn't a 3D person at all, because the last time I'd seen him and Reid would've been, you know, three or four years prior to that. Testament to a great deal at a great time. A little bit of color on the business itself. We are a specialty lines company. We've historically been based at Lloyd's. We last year wrote about $1 billion. That mix of business has been about 42% property, about 23% marine energy, the same again, specialty, and the remaining 13% is A&H, 7%, and casualty of 6%.
Very much focused on the property and the specialty space, and that's where we've seen the growth. It's been a very encouraging rate and actually continues to be very encouraging this year. The 77% growth last year will not be repeated this year. Manning gave a sort of growth of around 30% for this year, and that's what we expect to deliver this year. What happened in 2021? It was a good start. It was a solid foundation to the plan to deliver on a hard market strategy. That was very encouraging to get a ROE of 13, a combined ratio in the mid- to high 80s and $1 billion or 77% growth under our belt. We've built out the Lloyd's businesses.
We have 2 syndicates there, and we started up the Bermuda outfit. We keyed what happened to be a rather sleepy, quiet Class 3 reinsurer without a rating into a Class four full-blooded A-rated AM Best. This year, we'll write about $500 million in Bermuda and about $800 million in Lloyd's. We'll be about 60% insurance, about 40% reinsurance. We're sort of comfortable with that mix. That's been great in terms of the foundation. A good start, a good platform. Our numbers, we were pleased because it tested out some of our risk management in Bermuda, which was newer than London, which is older. We had $70 million of cat last year through Uri and the German floods and Ida.
We were pleased, and that was almost exactly on our cat budget for the year. That was encouraging that things were working. In terms of recruitment, we're very pleased with the team we've assembled. We've taken advantage of disruption in some of our peer group to hire and assemble a very good team. We're now at 210 people, and a year and a half ago, we were probably near 150. We're encouraged by the recruits. How many of those will be the wrong recruits? We don't know yet, but it's looking good right now. We always get things wrong. We have a long list of things we get wrong. The priorities now are really just to deliver on the present. We had a plan.
We have a five-year plan. Nobody believed a five-year plan when we came with a five-year plan, not least Manning or Nick. I did. We're very solidly year one, and year two, we're on track for that as well. We feel good about that. We feel good about the market and feel we're slightly better about the market now than we did expect to feel at this stage. We think between what's been happening in Florida recently, and I'm sure Tony will be talking about that with Elementum, and inflationary conditions and the COVID spikes and the cat spikes and the Ukraine spikes, that this enhances the offering of the product because people realize how much risk is out there in this property and specialty world in which we inhabit. We're feeling good about the year ahead.
The top line is tracking. Who knows about the bottom line? Obviously, Ukraine is obviously still live and a series of terrible events there. From a numbers rather than a human perspective, we think that's a manageable deal there. We booked $21 million in the first quarter. No reason not to stick with the plan for this year either, other than what the heck's happening with the fixed income market. Broadly speaking, on the underwriting space, feeling pretty good for now. Might be different next year.
Thank you, Ian. Let's pause there and open for questions about Ark. Yeah, please.
I'll repeat it if you want.
Just curious whether you do you manage your own investment portfolio, or do you send the premiums up to White Mountains to manage?
We manage them. They do get involved, but we believe we're still in control of the business. We've been doing that for many years and continue to do that.
Just a couple comments, and then we'll cover the investment portfolio on a consolidated basis in this presentation in a little bit, and you'll see how we think about it in three components: Ark, BAM, HG, and then the parent company. We'll sort of tie that together for you. The management of the actual money is outsourced to third parties, but we're overseeing it at the Ark level.
With rising rates, are you seeing more capital and kind of new entrants flowing into reinsurance or insurance?
Not right now, we're not. The big story was in terms of catching the wave, it's a commodity behaving cycle after all, was the beginning of last year really. That's when the new capital entered the industry, about the same time as us. It was really a sort of a race to get the capital, get in situ for the 1/1s where a lot of reinsurance is underwritten, and also get the people in situ. Do you get first dibs on the best people who you could pull down from other places fundamentally. That capital wave has now passed, and very limited amounts of new capital come into the industry right now from the underwriting space.
Just to put the wave in proportion, it was about $10 billion or $15 billion of incremental capital came into a market that has about $500 billion or $600 billion. Just give you a sense of order of magnitude for what happened at the end of 2020, early 2021.
I'll be gReidy. I'll ask one more. Do you have a target or an objective for your combined ratio over a medium to long-term horizon?
Yes and no. Actually we target an ROE of 15% to 20% over time. That's what we aim for. Now, historically, our business model has meant that about two-thirds, 70% of our return has come from the underwriting side and about a third from the investment side. In the old days, when we were just Lloyd's, effectively, we targeted a 93 combined. Now with the business mix being different, the proportion of reinsurance being different, and the mix outside of Lloyd's, and therefore the underwriting leverage being different, we actually have a sort of more floating combined ratio target. No, we don't have a hard. It's got to be 85 or 95. But we probably continue to operate within those ranges.
You should sort of think of sort of 90s, low 90s is a very comfortable, nice range to be within to achieve our ROE targets. Really we think ROE rather than combined.
Yeah. That's the objective here over a five-year timeframe, is to achieve those 15% to 20% ROEs while taking the business up from $500 million in premiums when we stepped in to north of $1.5 billion. I think we're gonna do it.
Yeah. That was the punt, if you will, that White Mountains were taking on Nick and us, which is, you got a lot of skin in the game. We've got a lot of skin in the game. Can we triple the business and continue to deliver those historic combines?
Other questions. Please.
Hi. I have three quick ones for you. The first was, why was taking our capital more attractive to you than remaining completely independent?
Scale of the opportunity, sort of the mercantilist fallacy. We'd much rather have a smaller slice of a much bigger pie than essentially 100% of a smaller pie. What we could do in terms of dilution of equity but get third-party capital to scale up was not what we could achieve here. We also find that within the Lloyd's environment, you can only grow by a certain amount because everybody has to share the leverage of the central fund. In order to do that, we'd have to put hard equity into our Bermuda reinsurer. It just wasn't viable to effectively triple the business in three years without additional capital.
Could you deploy more than what we've committed to and potentially taken more capital?
Great question.
The short answer is yes, but not at your prices. There's the tension. That's the flippant response. The more serious response is there's always a tension about the risk-reward trade-off you actually want to assume. There's an enormous amount of cat business available at this stage. Now, if you look at, you saw that slide about combined ratio over time in Lloyd's, us versus the other syndicates, and the combined ratio of volatility. You notice we're in sort of the top right-hand corner, which is, you know, green, obviously, colored to make us look good, but also, we're able to manage that volatility. If you assume too much cat at some stage, you are able to unbalance yourself substantially, and so therefore, how much of that opportunity do you want?
That's the tension. It depends on pricing. Yes, we could deploy more. Is that sensible, and do we want to deploy? I think that depends on opportunities out in the market, and it's a running dialogue with White Mountains on a less flippant note. We would definitely consider it.
When I look across the entire Lloyd's market, it looks to me like on average an unsatisfactory market. What mistakes are other people making, and how have you avoided those?
Got a long list. My top ones would be number one, lack of discipline. That manifests itself mostly by trying to grow into a soft market. People had a top line growth target, and people had a bottom line growth target, and if rates are going down and you want to grow, the amount of exposure you have to put on to maintain that top line growth means fundamentally the margins are getting squeezed out and you're probably gonna lose money. Now, because you can deliver a top line in a year, and because there's always a lag in earnings or losses in this instance, management teams will be put under pressure by shareholders to grow the top line and the bottom line, but you can only see one at a time.
Earnings growth or deterioration earnings lagged that growth in the top line and people were naive about how bad it was getting. We're quite simplistic about it. It's like it's a risk or trade-off. I think they grew at the wrong stage of the market cycle between 14 and 18. Lloyd's as a market grew 32%. We actually shrank by 13%. If people expect a linear growth story from us, they won't get it. We're literally here to make ROE. We're just here to make money. We're sort of quite simple and quite focused on that one. That lack of discipline was sort of number one. Number two, it was quite a horrific time to do with CATs as well. I mean, if you remember, 2017 had, you know, Harvey, Irma, Maria.
Add, if you were in Lloyd's, a couple of Mexican earthquakes, and you had the California wildfires. There's a clustering of CATs, which smashed things. Historically, what would happen is you had the insurance markets, who are less disciplined than the reinsurance markets, and the reinsurance markets less disciplined than the retro markets, because that was smaller than that, which was smaller than that. These guys would drag them up, reprice, which dragged all pricing up and dragged the cost of capital up. What happened with the convergence of ILS, alternative markets with the insurance market of the $0.5 trillion that Manning was talking about is eventually somebody kicked away a couple of legs of the stool, and that.
The larger financial pool finding the smaller financial pool at a time where things weren't looking so rosy over here and people were looking for orthogonal risk meant that traditional relationship broke down. CATs were underpriced in terms of that risk, and it wasn't getting the rebound when the CATs happened. The biggest disappointment in this whole era was 2018 1/1. We were expecting the market to harden, and as soon as we managed to renew some of our reinsurance and retro programs in substantively the same manner, we knew it was not going to harden. We're sitting twiddling our thumbs for a further three years. I think those were two large elements of it.
I think the third and final one, which is still playing out in the market, is under reserving within casualty. Of course there's always a very long time between what you price casualty at and what those reserves then manifest themselves as. Much longer learning loop, if you will, than property. With inflation now coming through as well, I think there will be a continuing element of disappointment in certain people's reserves, which means that will be continued reduction in risk appetite for certain peers out there in the market, which I think just then extends really perhaps the run that we have in terms of opportunity for the property and specialty markets. Bit of a ramble. There's more, you know.
Okay. Other questions for Ian. Please.
Thank you. A few questions. First, could you talk about the nature of your Ukraine related loss and if this, I believe $21 million, kind of, covers significant part of your potential ultimate exposure there? The second question more about the reinsurance side of your business. How big is your property CAT portfolio, and what was your position and did you participate in any significant way in the Florida renewal this year and overall your kind of your take on the Florida market?
Okay. I'm bound to forget all the components of that question, so I'll try and remember. Starting with Ukraine first. We booked $21 million of loss in the first quarter. That's the earned portion of it. The sort of. Looking at Ukraine as an insurance and reinsurance loss rather than in the terms of the humanitarian disaster, which it obviously is is akin to looking at a car crash unfold in slow motion, and we're seeing it frame by frame by frame unfold. It's slightly unusual to know how it's going to ultimately evolve too. We've made a bunch of assumptions. It's very hard to see on a net basis how for us it could go above $50 million, for example, right? But what we've booked is that odd twenty odd.
Now the current mix of that is predominantly around aviation and political risk and political violence. Really if you think about the political violence, it's a war on land. You have a limit for war on land. There is war happening on land, unless you believe it's a special military operation. Either way it's covered. There is a loss for that. We've also sort of assumed in the aviation market, broadly speaking, that this is gonna be an aviation war loss. Now, there's obviously gonna be a lifetime of lawyering to decide how this unfolds, whether it's in the all risk market in aviation or whether it's gonna be in the aviation war market. We've assumed for these purposes, it's that.
What we can say is given that's our view on it, this is the likely net loss to us from that. As it stands, the bulk is actually aviation loss with a little bit of political violence, and a small amount of finally what we would call marine hull war. We've got about 30 or 40 boats or shares of boats in the Black Sea trapped in port. None of those boats are at the bottom of the sea as it happens at the moment, but those boats are stuck in port because, of course, it's mined outside, and they don't want to go out to sea and then end up at the bottom of the ocean.
What happens is, in this instance, we're assuming that those boats are blocked and trapped, and so while they're blocked and trapped, typically mostly after 12 months, they're effectively written off. You get a boat. Well, I get a boat, you get your money. There's a certain assumption around that. There are assumptions. The clearest thing we can probably look at is about the aviation piece. The next clearest is really around political violence, and the rest becomes more speculative about how political risk some of that other unearned portion, the other sort of 29 will unfold.
When we made that assumption, for example, there were certain assumptions about whether Kyiv would fall, whether the Ukrainian government would fall, and therefore whether the Ministry of Finance, for example, the various trading houses, would be able to fulfill its obligations for payments for sort of shipments of grain or other commodities, for example. It's still sort of unwritten the final chapters of that one. That, that's our view on Ukraine as it stands.
Can I jump in on Ukraine?
Please.
Just to tie back to numbers. First quarter, you booked $21 million, of which $3 had been reported. Just to give you an order of magnitude of how uncertain this is, and the rest was IBNR. Skipping ahead to the end, we think it's hard to imagine an outcome that's worse than $50 net. Additional loss reserving between $21 and $50 is based on a series of assumptions upon assumption upon assumption about the way the geopolitical events will play out, which is what makes this quite unusual to try to handicap. I think if you look at $3, $21, and $50 and understand what those numbers mean, that'll give you a good frame of reference.
Worst case scenario, this is gonna look like a mid-size cat, which is something that's material, but in and of itself, it doesn't wreck the financial outcome for the year.
Yeah. By analogy, another complicated claim, which was really before White Mountains' involvement was COVID. You know, this is an evolving catastrophe, but nobody really knows how it's going to end up. That ended up about net $35 million for us. Again, you know, it's a mid-size annoying cat to read across. As Manning said, we've really only had actually one proper claim yet, which is kind of remove kit from somebody who doesn't want to give the kit up right now. That's that. I think we had a question. You had a question.
Question was about Florida renewals. Maybe if you just talk about your experience, because we're gonna ask Anthony Rettino from Elementum to talk about what the hell is going on in Florida.
Okay. I'll give. There's oversized with the property reinsurance book. Okay. We've got about $150 million, maybe $170 million in Bermuda this year in property treaty reinsurance. It's mostly cat XLs. And we've got about $50 million in London, so $200 million this last, you know. It'll be less than 20% of the book this year, about a sixth, probably by the end of the year. Florida chaos. I'll let Tony talk in more detail about it. Rates up 15% to 0% to a lot more than that. And a lot of fixes to go.
We're much more optimistic for the 1/1s and onwards next year than again we would've been at the beginning of this year for 1/1s next year. A lot of moving parts.
Maybe I'll just throw in there as well. Overall, Florida for us, we took our exposure down about 20%, and we increased our premiums received by about 40%. Now, the delta between the two was a lot of the market went to money up front, so you buy your second event in advance, whereas last year that was much less of the case. If you strip that extra premium we're getting now for the second event, our premiums like for like were about flat on 20% less exposure. Overall, our premiums were up about 40%.
Okay. Other questions for Ark? Okay. Thank you. All right. Let's turn now to Kudu, and let me introduce Rob Jakacki, CEO, Charlie Ruffel, Managing Partner. So just a reminder, Kudu provides capital solutions and advisory services to boutique asset and wealth management firms. It targets what we call the middle market, which are typically firms that have AUM between, say, $2 billion to $10 billion. The capital is used by those companies for a range of purposes, some of which you see here. What Kudu receives back is what we call in our financial statements a participation contract, which is kind of a mouthful. It's typically a revenue share, not always, but usually. Plus, it has equity participation rights.
If a portfolio company has a subsequent event, we participate as we would as an equity holder, and you saw that in the BOS exit last year. Kudu has grown very nicely since we first invested in 2018 and now has a portfolio of 18 investee companies as of yesterday. They span a range of investment formats, strategies, and geographies. It's quite diversified. I do think there is some emphasis on wealth management and private capital and a relative lack of emphasis on traditional long-only public market securities. White Mountains has now committed a total of $420 million of equity capital to Kudu, including the $50 million that we did in the MassMutual deal. Kudu has in place a $300 million investment-grade rated debt facility with MassMutual. Plenty of dry powder and a very robust deal pipeline.
Kudu had a really strong 2021. I wanna pause for a second and talk about the financial results. We get questions from shareholders sometimes about what should I focus on when I look at Kudu's results? A key metric to follow, I think, here is what we've labeled as levered return. A levered return, what does that mean? It's a conservative measure of the running return on equity capital for the Kudu business as a going concern. It excludes all unrealized gains and losses in the fair market value of the portfolio, and it also excludes any realized gains or losses from exit transactions like BOS.
What it really is is the running cash flow that's coming off the portfolio, less the running cost of debt and overhead. One more dollop of conservatism, which is it excludes Kudu's share of carried interest economics that are embedded in the private capital deals that it has done. If you made some assumptions about that over the fullness of time and annualized that assumption, probably would add a point or two to the number that you see here. When you step back from it, I think a way to think about Kudu is it has matured over the last three years into a business that's now producing a running return in the low double digits comfortably with a lot more upside than downside around that number. Activity levels were high in 2021.
We did four new deals and two add-ons. Of course, we closed the deal, the debt deal last March and the equity deal this May. We had our first exit with BOS merging into Cerity, generating excellent returns for Kudu. We have a second exit on the way, also expected to generate excellent returns with TIG. The fair market value, it grew nicely in 2021 of 18%. First quarter has been really good. All of the numbers are pretty steady, and the portfolio actually increased in value, fair value, despite the market volatility. Slide 28. Here you see the levered return growing, and the composition of these bars is important. You can see the growing importance of the debt equity capital in the gray bars, and then the light blue reflects the realized gains and losses over time, both unrealized and realized.
That's additional growth that's outside of the levered yield kind of running calculation. On the far right-hand side, you see where we are snapshot for the capital base, and the bright blue on the top gives you an idea for dry powder. The first bar shows you where we were the minute we closed the MassMutual transaction, and then after the Gramercy deal was closed yesterday on the far right column. That's where .e are. Okay, let me stop there and invite Rob to share some thoughts.
Thank you, Manning. Good morning to everybody. Just wanna spend a few minutes maybe amplifying some of the things that Manning pointed out about our past year, some of the accomplishments that we're very proud of, really four in particular. First, on the new investments front, the five investments that we've made since our last meeting with you last year are important to us, not only in scale, the five deals comprise about $260 million of total capital, both debt and equity funded, but it's also the diversity and spread of type of manager that we've invested in, really filling in our investable universe from wealth management to alternative, both liquid and illiquid managers, as well as a small amount in traditional.
We still see opportunities across that full spectrum, and last year was a good example of us deploying capital along those lines. All of these managers are specialists in their respective areas with world-class leadership, so we're very excited about these new members of our portfolio. We're not done. Pipeline is as strong as ever. We're currently looking at opportunities over 20, which is on the high end of our typical volume, again, across the board in terms of types of firm, but all exciting opportunities, two of which we are in exclusivity right now with the expectations to close in the next couple of months.
More to come, and we're very optimistic about the investable universe in front of us. Secondarily, on the new capital front, I'll amplify what Manning has been telling you about MassMutual. Very exciting for us to bring them into the partnership. It's the first time we've brought in a new equity owner into our operating company, and it's an extension of the relationship that we've been building with MassMutual over the past 18 months. As Manning has said, it started as a refinancing of our credit facility in late 2020, early 2021, and has grown as we've gotten to know that team and them us, and we really think there are opportunities for strategic interaction, which we look forward to working with them about more on.
Thirdly, on the performance of the portfolio, important to point out, given the turbulence in the market, most notably over the past 9 months, how proud we are of our portfolio and the durability of our portfolio. In the 4 quarters ending March 31, our portfolio was up 17% on a same-store basis. Apologize for repeating some of the soundbites that you heard from Manning, but it is worth emphasizing. In Q1, as you heard, amid a broad market sell-off, our portfolio grew by a little over 3%. Very pleased with that. It does reflect the diversification that we've built over these 18 investments, and that was on full display over the most recent few quarters.
A couple things to point out there, in our alternatives book, both liquid and illiquid, we saw our managers start to shrug off some of the sluggishness in the capital raising environments for their businesses, and starting to grow their strategies on an organic basis. That was encouraging. Secondarily, on the wealth management side, we saw our wealth managers add share of wallet from their clients, which really shows you the value and the importance of trusted advice in uncertain times. That was also what we would have expected to see despite market turbulence. Last thing I'll point out is you know, picking up on the liquidity event we experienced at the end of Q4 with Bingham, Osborn & Scarborough, BOS.
It's never something that we initiate. It's very important for us when we enter into a partnership not to bring forced liquidity events on our managers. It's out of sync with our desire to achieve an alignment with the teams that we're backing. If ever there's an opportunity for a manager to engage and initiate such a transaction, like BOS did, we participate in full. It was a great outcome for everybody. You know, they were our first wealth manager that we invested in in 2018 and enjoyed a great few years with them. It's bittersweet to have them part the portfolio, but it was a great outcome all around, and we wish them well. They're just some of the highlights.
As always, I want to thank Manning and the White Mountains team for their support and guidance, and look forward to, you know, more prosperity with them.
Questions for Kudu? Please.
Hi. Why do wealth management firms tend to use Kudu instead of another capital provider?
It's a good question. I mean, there's a lot of capital out there, as you may know, looking to partner with wealth management businesses. It's really become a pretty hot space, and there's a lot of different capital solutions. But why a manager would partner with Kudu, like, Douglass Winthrop did last year, was really some of the things I was just mentioning a minute ago. We are desiring to achieve a true alignment with them. We're never going to change the way that they conduct their business, and never going to impose an event on them that isn't wanted themselves.
DWA wanted to retain their independence and preserve the culture and the quality of the organization that they'd built, and our capital really allowed for that to happen better than other opportunities that might have been before them.
Can I just amplify that? I mean, in fairness, not every wealth manager does business with Kudu. It's competitive. We have attributes and strengths that we think stand out. We play our hand. Other providers play their hand. We win the deals we win and other deals go elsewhere. But I think we're doing a good job.
How has AUM generally trended over your ownership of the wealth management firms?
It has trended higher. I think we've seen across our wealth management firms growth, depending on their specific model, both driven from organic and inorganic opportunities. We've been pleased, you know, to see that. Obviously, exposure that they might have to public markets might have brought down some AUM in recent quarters, but as I mentioned, we've seen many of these firms grow AUM through greater share of wallet. You get a little bit of a few factors in there, but generally it's upwardly trending.
Question on Kudu, please.
Hi. Can you please just talk about typical deal terms and the economics to Kudu? Is it off the top? Is it off the bottom? Just a typical transaction, what does it look like?
Yes. A typical transaction is one where we're always minority investors. That's a very bright line for us, and that's to really achieve that alignment. We want our teams to have more skin in the game than we do to perfect that alignment. The way our deals are structured specifically is an allocation of a company's earnings as defined by a percentage of top-line revenues. We are sharing in the risk of these businesses, again, to be in the same side of the table as our partner firms and the principals running those firms. We insulate ourselves from the day-to-day operations of the firm by taking a share of revenue to take us out of the discussion on their budgets and their P&L process.
you know, we're always looking for a cash yield that we achieve when we're looking to participate in those cash flows. All of our firms are profitable entities, and we can see a visibility and sustainability of that free cash flow that they generate and our participation through that revenue share.
Just one thing to add, which is too simple but useful guidepost. It's a minority deal, typically a revenue share, and typically targeting a 10% unlevered cash yield on the dollars in on day one. Essentially, on a blended basis, we've hit that number. Other questions on Kudu? Okay. Thank you, Rob. All right. Let's now turn to MediaAlpha. Please allow me to introduce Steven Yi, CEO and Co-founder. Just as a reminder, MediaAlpha is a customer acquisition technology platform. It operates in multiple verticals and has particular expertise in P&C health and life insurance. In simple terms, the MediaAlpha platform connects advertisers, who are often insurance carriers, and enables them to acquire potential customer traffic in the form of calls, clicks, and leads efficiently and transparently. Then MediaAlpha collects a percentage of all the transaction volume that it facilitates.
It's in effect a toll business. Slide 30. After a decade of growth, MediaAlpha hit a big milestone in October 2020 when it executed a successful IPO under the ticker symbol MAX. As a reminder, White Mountains sold shares at $19 a share in the IPO, and again at $46 a share in a secondary offering in March 2021. In the second half of 2021, however, the MAX shares sold off, ending the year at about $15 and change. Because of that sell-off, White Mountains incurred a $400 million unrealized loss on our remaining position of about 17 million shares. In effect, over the fullness of the calendar year, we gave back, on an unrealized basis, a portion of the windfall gains that we had generated in 2020.
Why did this happen? The main event in 2021 was the turn in the underwriting cycle for personal auto insurers. We came out of COVID lockdown, miles driven started to increase, accidents started to increase, loss frequency started to increase, and severity is up as well, driven by inflationary pressures and a number of other factors. All of this has put pressure on the underwriting results at personal lines insurance companies. I think it's fair to say that the intensity of the cycle change caught those carriers by surprise a bit. They're in midstream in the process of trying to restore their own underwriting profitability, mostly by seeking rate. In the meantime, they've cut back on customer acquisition a lot. When they cut back on customer acquisition and advertising spend, that directly impacts volumes in MediaAlpha's P&C vertical.
Simple as that. Notwithstanding all of that, which was significant and continues to be significant in the first quarter of 2022, but notwithstanding all of it, MediaAlpha had a record 2021, and that's a little bit lost in what's happened with the share price. Transaction volume crossed $1 billion, and growth in the health and life insurance verticals was particularly strong, up a lot. EBITDA was flat at $58 million, and that sort of reflects a bunch of new public company costs that weren't there before, and also some continued investments in growth. The same themes have really continued forward into 2022. There is pressure on the P&C vertical, given the dynamics in the cycle, and that's impacted overall transaction volume in EBITDA. We are seeing some carriers start to spend a bit more.
The ones that were early to take underwriting actions are starting to increase ad budgets, but it's not consistent, it's a bit sporadic, and it's too early to call it a trend. We know with certainty that the cycle's gonna turn again at some point. It's a question of when. One thing away from all those macro trends I wanna point out is that MediaAlpha has been assertive in early 2022 around capital management. This is a business that's producing, you know, approaching $50 million of free cash flow. This EBITDA is real cash, and it's taking steps to be intelligent about what it does with that cash. They've closed an accretive roll-up transaction, and they've implemented a share repurchase program. I think they're making intelligent decisions with shareholder value creation in mind.
The last point I would make is that just keep the big picture in mind here. White Mountains has returned 9x its investment in cash on MediaAlpha, and we have almost 17 million shares of continuing upside. The cyclical headwinds in P&C and personal lines are gonna subside, and then they're gonna turn into tailwinds again at some point. In the meantime, we're very happy to be invested alongside Steve and Eugene and the team. Also, keep in mind, the more powerful force at work here over time is not the cycle, it's the secular shift by insurance companies from offline advertising to digital advertising. That shift is in the early innings. It's got a long way to go, and MediaAlpha's in great shape there. All right. The next slide just gives you a visual of the incredible growth in MediaAlpha's business.
We got invested in 2014. You see the strong upsurge. You see in 2020 and 2021, a big surge in the P&C vertical with the COVID lockdown because the opposite of what happened in 2021 and 2022 happened then. People stopped driving. There were huge profits available to P&C insurers, and they spent them on advertising. Of course, that has reversed again in the last year or so. This has been an exciting journey with MediaAlpha, and the future remains bright, and we're delighted to continue to be invested here. Let me invite Steve to say a few words. I did wanna ask one question of you that's on the minds of all shareholders, which is, what have you done for us lately, Steve?
Well, thanks, Manning. I really appreciate it. I think Manning summarized it really well, what's going on with our business. I will tell you that in the beginning of 2018, as a technology company, you might know this term, we set a BHAG. It sounds horrible, but it's like a big, big hairy audacious goal. In the beginning of 2018, we set that goal of attaining $1 billion in transaction value through our marketplace. I guess in the year that we hit that, it certainly didn't feel very good. I think it was maybe the worst record year, at least, you know, from me as an entrepreneur's perspective, that we've ever had.
You know, certainly the challenges facing the auto insurance vertical are very real, but having been through this cycle before in 2016 and 2017, actually back then, we didn't know what the heck was going on. I mean, Morgan, you know, had to explain to us that the auto insurance industry tends to move in these underwriting cycles, and if they're not profitable, and they're taking rate actions, they tend to pull back on marketing, and that obviously makes a lot of sense right now. Manning alluded to the fact that the severity issue, I think, caught auto insurance carriers off guard last year as frequency started to go back up to normalized levels.
I think what that meant was, particularly in the second half of last year, that auto insurance companies pulled back pretty severely on the non-rate actions that they could take or the levers that they had access to. The fact that the industry's moving to more of an online, right, customer acquisition model, you know, still in the early innings, right? What that means is that companies like GEICO and State Farm and others have a lot invested in offline media, and you just can't pull those levers in offline media very quickly. You're locked into the TV buy six to 12 months in advance, billboard sponsorships, et cetera. What non-rate action levers did they have to pull in the last year? It's really online marketing channels like ours.
I think we were hit disproportionately hard in the second half of this last year, and we continue to be hit hard this year. We were hit hard because the inherent flexibility of the online customer acquisition channel. That's not just us, by the way. That's Google, that's Facebook, that's other channels like that. What we're encouraged by, though, is that the secular shift continues. If you saw Allstate's first quarter results, they talked about the transformative growth plan that they initiated in 2019. That year, I think 79% of their auto insurance policies were sold through their exclusive agents. In the first quarter of this year, even though Allstate has pulled back on marketing quite a bit, right? Their direct channel represented 37% of all auto insurance policies sold.
That's really the manifestation of the secular shift that we're talking about, that a lot of carriers in the P&C industry still have yet to make. Right? Excited about that. What we're focused on right now with the auto insurance business in particular is using this opportunity to get a lot of, like, efficiency gains for the carriers. That means better technical integrations, better conversion tracking integrations, utilizing this opportunity to talk to carriers about, as they're on the sidelines as buyers, actually becoming sellers, and we're making notable progress there.
What I mean by that is, a notable base of supply that we have are from insurance companies or insurance carriers who, when they know that they're not gonna sell a policy to a given consumer, actually show ads from other insurance companies so that they can make money from those consumers who are shopping on their site, that they paid a lot to get to the site, their site, and through the quote process, where the data tells them that they're not gonna buy a policy from them. The option they have is just let that consumer go or make $30, $40, $50 by referring them to another carrier. That was actually our first third party, supply partner, Esurance. That's how we got connected to White Mountains in the first place.
It's that business model that in a time like this, carriers become open to. We're engaged in a number of those types of discussions with insurance carriers. What we expect is that when the market turns, which is definitely a matter of when and not if, that we'll see the types of outsized gains that we saw coming out of the last hard market cycle in 2017 and 2018. On the health and life insurance side, health insurance was a record-breaking year for us, both in under 65 and Medicare. Most notably within Medicare, we're excited about the carriers making that shift to actually acquiring customers directly, their investment in online enrollment, which really helps us.
We're investing in product development to help them make this transition to more of an online enrollment process, as well as to make helping them make the shift to direct customer acquisition, as opposed to relying on brokers and agents to sell their policies. I think that's it.
Questions for Steve? Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you. All right, shifting gears, let's talk about PassportCard DavidShield. Please allow me to introduce Alon Ketzef, Group CEO and founder. PassportCard is an MGA for travel and expat medical insurance, and it delivers its services pretty much anywhere in the world. It provides coverage and settles claims in real time without paper via a debit card solution. This is a vastly superior mousetrap that drives high levels of customer satisfaction, premium pricing levels for the company, and high reactivation rates. Travelers and expats who use PassportCard DavidShield once are highly likely to use it again, which is quite unusual, especially in the travel insurance business. The business was launched in Israel. It remains Israeli centric, and what that means is that most of our customers are emanating from Israel. Our solutions are global, but our customers are Israeli primarily.
Our long-term goal is to add new customer markets around the world, and we're pursuing this selectively, targeting markets that are uniquely connected to the attributes that we feature. PassportCard DavidShield is an MGA, it's important to remember, does not retain underwriting risk, which it cedes to its global reinsurance partner, Allianz. Slide 33. To state the obvious, PassportCard DavidShield is the White Mountains business that was most directly impacted by the COVID pandemic. The shutdown in leisure travel pretty much took travel insurance volumes to zero for the better part of 2020 and early 2021. 2021, in turn, was a strong bounce back year, driven by the resumption of leisure travel and continued steady growth in expat medical.
One key figure to illustrate that for PassportCard DavidShield as a whole, fourth quarter 2021 premium levels surpassed pre-pandemic fourth quarter 2019 premium levels for the first time. Full year 2021 numbers were not quite back, but fourth quarter were, and that continues, and it's a very safe bet that 2022 will be a record year for PassportCard DavidShield. What's driving the business post pandemic? Three things. One is greater demand for insurance due to heightened risk perception. If you travel now, you wanna be covered. Second, higher pricing. Our pricing per unit of risk is up about 50% from pre-pandemic levels. Third, higher market share, and this is really a testament to the job that Alon did managing this business through the crisis. Our market share is up about 50% from pre-pandemic levels.
Those three things are what are really driving the business. Travel volumes, trip days, are still only about 65% of pre-pandemic levels. It would stand to reason that there's more room to recover in terms of pure volume. All right. Last thing I would just mention here is that our work on international expansion continues, and I wanna point out two initiatives. One is expat medical in Germany, which we have continued to build straight through the COVID crisis, and which is now emerging for us as a nice little core business. Very happy with that. The second is travel insurance in Australia, which was our big target market pre-pandemic. We suspended operations in Australia because the government shut down international travel completely.
We still think we have the makings of a successful business in Australia, and we'd like to have another go, and we're working through what our options might look like there. More to come on that. This is a hell of a slide. I don't think I've ever quite seen a slide just like this, and I think it speaks for itself. With that, I'm gonna let Alon add a few words, please.
Thank you, Manning. Pleasure to be here and to see you again after three years. Rough seas. Manning pretty much said it all, but I would like to say, and to share with you the phone call that I had with Manning back in March of 2020. Manning picked up the phone and told me, "Alon, this is your opportunity. You are getting a direct hit, but most probably when you get at the other side of the tunnel, your business will be much stronger, much bigger demand." You were right. Three months later, you called me again, and you quoted Winston Churchill, and you said, "When you go through hell, keep on going." Here we are. Thank you, Manning, for the support. Indeed, we are a technology company engaged in insurance and specifically in cross-border, accident and health.
Growth rate is pretty much steady if we exclude COVID period. We try to maintain a growth rate that is combined with EBITDA will be no lower than 30%, hopefully 40%. That really puts us in a unique situation where you see an InsurTech company that is actually making money and growing at the same time. For as far as I remember, we never lost money, and we didn't have a negative cash flow. Even during COVID times, we managed to have a positive EBITDA. We have every intention to keep it this way while keep on growing. Indeed, we are very happy with the results in the Israeli market, and we plan on having a record year this year and hopefully going forward as well.
Germany is making first signs of success, and we hope that by next year, we will be able to deliver some great news in this room. Australia, we invested a lot in setting up Australia. We were on the right track. January, February 2020, we were at a trajectory of $20 million on an annual basis, and then we had to shut it off and as the borders were shut off completely. It was quite an ordeal for us. Trauma, I would say. Here we are, picking up the pieces and try to build it back from scratch again. Hopefully, we will manage to do this this year as well. Overall, we are very bullish. We are excited. We monitor the situation. We want to see where COVID is heading.
I have to say that if COVID is within a certain corridor, it actually works in our favor. It keeps people on their toes. The penetration rate is higher. People are buying insurance. Nobody's leaving the country now without insurance, which is a good thing. People are looking for a premium solution. We are a premium solution. Thus, we get the highest market share, highest NPS score, and the lowest loss ratio in the industry. Keeping those three bases in line puts us in a good spot. Thank you.
Thank you, Alon. Questions on PassportCard, DavidShield. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
All right. Last but not least, let's turn to Elementum. Let me introduce Anthony Rettino, Senior Portfolio Manager and Founding Partner, John DeCaro, Senior Portfolio Manager and Founding Partner, and Mike France, CFO. Elementum is an asset management business. It manages assets for institutional investors and invests in natural cat exposed risks, cat bonds, CRI, and in some cases, primary insurance. Typical business model is fee-based, management fees and performance fees. We acquired a 30% stake in the business just about 3 years ago, 3 years and 6 days. Separately, we've put $50 million from our investment portfolio into the funds themselves to eat our own cooking. We look at those investments as having an attractive risk-return profile and they're a nice diversifier in our portfolio.
We think of them as a non-correlated high yield bond substitute. Slide 36. Elementum had a pretty flat 2021 and a pretty flat early 2022 so far. Now, flat in the current marketplace for ILS is actually quite good, and they have moved up the league table and improved their competitive position on a relative basis as a result of maintaining. The business is producing a nice distributable cash stream of cash flow at about 7% annual yield. We've been investing in the business. The market conditions, I think, are pretty good for investments. Then there's a big question of if and when investor sentiment for this strategy will turn again and turn positive. That's where we are. Please let me ask Tony to share a few words, starting with Florida.
Well, there's nowhere to go but up if we start in Florida. Let's start there. First, thank you, Manning, the board and the White Mountains team for their partnership. It has been a great three years. We look forward to many more. Looking at Florida, I think as Ian mentioned, it's a mess, right? Unfortunately, we are in the midst of the hard landing. That was inevitable after years of neglect by the legislature, by rating agencies, and others in the market. Our view on the recently passed legislation is mixed. There are certainly, in the last two years, the legislature has genuinely tried to address certain bad behaviors of the market.
However, the focus of legislation continues to be on the abuses of the past and trying to address what's happening over here, but you're not changing the incentives that create that environment to begin with. That create an environment, the state of Florida, 8% of property claims and 76% of the litigation in the U.S., right? That is the fundamental problem. If you're not addressing that, and if you're not controlling that, you're not really doing anything. We've had a very measured and intentional approach to Florida.
We have raised opportunistic capital over the last couple of years to look at the most and invest in the most disruptive part of the market, which is the higher risk end of the spectrum, which is offering, you know, significantly higher risk-adjusted returns, you know, more than double versus five years ago. We are fortunate to have a couple of, you know, investors who have leaned in to that environment. That's not just for Florida, that's just in that end of the spectrum as well. Then we've actually reduced the number of companies that we're supporting in Florida just because there is a significant deterioration in their infrastructure, in their financial condition. We just think there's fewer good quality people to invest in.
We think that there is, you know, we've already seen eight companies go out of business in the last year. There's probably at least another three or four that probably should join them. You know, we are encouraged by some of the larger companies that were somewhat dormant are starting to lean in. That is a positive to the market to have better, well-capitalized companies with good infrastructure and good discipline participating. That's ultimately good for the market. Keep going? All right. In terms of the last year, as I mentioned, we did raise from a new investor some dedicated capital for the higher risk, let's call it our high yield strategy in 2021. We were able to add to that with several investors in 2022.
That's really very complementary to what we're already doing and allows us to take advantage of the market disruption that we're seeing. As Manning mentioned, we maintained AUM despite significant headwinds on the investor side. It's really a little bit of a fatigue. five very significant years of loss activity, frequency of losses, you know, hurricanes and floods and wildfires and everything else. That has really created a fatigue, but it's also created this, you know, what is, you know, probably a once-in-a-decade or two investment environment, probably the best we've seen since 2006 on the reinsurance side. Eventually, that type of risk-adjusted expected returns leads to investor interest.
Those investors who went through 11 years of, you know, very low loss activity following Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Rita, Hurricane Wilma in 2005 up until 2017. Very quiet period. The market grew. As Ian mentioned, 2018, one of the great things about ILS was people always worried, you know, is, you know, are they gonna come back after an event? Well, they came back in droves. I refer to it as the great reload of 2018. Everybody did exactly what we said, which was, when you get a lot of catastrophes, come back in. That's good, that's good. Those investors also then saw the next couple of years and became much more disciplined.
You know, three years ago, I think people thought that the, you know, we had people telling us the cycle was dead. Like, oh, the institutional investors are just gonna come in and, you know, every time there's an event, it's just gonna never change. You know, we were, you know, we chuckled a bit. It's interesting to see that the market isn't dead. It turns out that our clients, institutional investors, are much more, they have a lot of capital. They're very stable. They're very long-term in their thinking, but they want to get paid an aggregate price for the risk that they're assuming. They don't, that doesn't just, you know, flow in, right?
Obviously, the big development in ILS is that you take these property catastrophe risks that, you know, Ian mentioned, they can only take so much on their balance sheet. Well, if you are a sovereign wealth fund and you're investing 2% of your assets, you can put it all in Florida. Most of our clients don't want us to be that concentrated, but you can be much more concentrated in the opportunities. That's why what we do and what Ark does is somewhat complementary because we are bringing different type of capital to bear on the market. Year ahead, we're really optimistic. Couple things, obviously, the great investment environment. We've improved our relative position. As we've mentioned, we have low trapped capital levels, which increases our earnings power.
The recent market volatility is a good reminder of the value of diversification, including the fact that we do benefit from a rising interest rate environment. Our investments do. This has led to starting to see some green shoots on the investor pipeline. You know, like I said, we, you know, the market eventually and that level of investment generally follows the quality of the opportunity set. We've taken in the last couple years and said, "Okay, we're gonna invest in the business, we're gonna invest in infrastructure, we're gonna invest in people, we're gonna invest in expertise and depth," so that when that market eventually turns, we're gonna be in a great position to scale. We're not gonna be looking to, you know, add resources at that time.
We're gonna be poised and ready to go. Thankful to, you know, Manning and the team for all their support in making that investment.
Questions for Elementum. Thank you, Chad. All right. I'm gonna hand off to Reid now, President Reid, that is, to cover investments.
Okay, thank you, Manning. White Mountains has maintained a consistent approach to investments for many years. Our objective overall is to maximize long-term total returns after tax, while taking prudent levels of risk and maintaining a diversified portfolio. When you look at our asset allocation in this context, over the long term, relative to our peers, our fixed income duration has generally been shorter, and our exposure to equities has generally been higher, as we basically prefer to take our investment risk in the equity portfolio. It's important to note that we do not make investment decisions in a vacuum. We consider our overall capital position, as well as broader corporate needs, and we also consider our overall level of comfort with the risk profile of our businesses and balance sheet when constructing and managing the portfolio.
You can actually see that in practice today, as we have historically low equity exposure due to limited undeployed capital of the parent company and limited capacity for equities at HG Global and The Ark. Once the NSM sale closes, this is likely to change. Based upon our view of market conditions at the time, as well as our outlook for new deployment opportunities, we're likely going to invest a portion of the proceeds in the equity markets. Next slide. In order to better understand the positioning of our portfolio, it's helpful to first highlight, which Manning mentioned earlier, that we now have three separate and distinct mandates within the consolidated portfolio, each with its own objectives. The first and largest mandate is The Ark portfolio.
Here, the objective is to safeguard capital and provide sufficient liquidity to meet insurance obligations while investing for total return. Here, we're primarily invested in fixed income with a modest amount of equities. The second mandate is the HG Re portfolio. Here, the objectives are to preserve claims paying resources and liquidity in support of our reinsurance arrangements with BAM. Here, we are strictly invested in fixed income securities and cannot invest in equities. The third mandate is the parent company portfolio, and here, the objectives are first to safeguard the amounts backing our known capital commitments and invest the balance, including our undeployed capital, for total return. Here, we're invested primarily in fixed income with a small amount of strategic investments in our alternative asset portfolio. Again, once we close on the sale of NSM, that's likely to change. Okay, next slide.
This is a snapshot of our current positioning as of March 31st, and I'll highlight here that these numbers are on a management basis, so they exclude the investment portfolio of BAM, they exclude Kudu's participation contracts, and it also excludes our unconsolidated entities such as MediaAlpha, Passport Card, and Elementum. Here you can see how the objectives within each of our mandates is impacting our current positioning. In Ark, you see a large fixed income portfolio, low duration, average credit quality of A. At Ark, there's only a modest amount of equities, as they prefer to use the bulk of their risk budget in their insurance business. At HG Re. Oh, still a couple more comments on this. At HG Re, you can see we have a high quality short to medium duration fixed income portfolio supporting our obligations to BAM.
Then lastly, at the parent, we have fixed income securities, and again, due to limited undeployed capital, we only have a small amount of equities, and strategic investments. When you add it all up, we have $2.1 billion of generally high quality, short duration fixed income instruments, and this is consistent with our historical positioning. We have about $0.5 billion in equities at Ark and the parent company. When you look at our consolidated equity exposure, that's the number on the bottom right there. Even when including Kudu's participation contracts, which have mark-to-market exposure, but a much lower beta than the broader market, as well as our shares in MediaAlpha, which obviously have mark-to-market risk, you can see that our equity exposure is just 38% of adjusted shareholders' equity.
That, again, is on the lower side of our historical positioning, but appropriate for current circumstances. Next slide. This is a summary of our management basis returns for the past two plus years. 2020 was a good year on an absolute basis, but a disappointing year on a relative basis. There were a couple of drivers behind this. One was some active investment decisions that we made, including to maintain our international common stock portfolios, which underperformed the broader equity markets in the first half of the year.
The bulk of the underperformance, though, was driven by broader corporate needs affecting the portfolio, and specifically in this case, our need to liquidate our entire parent company common stock portfolio in the second half of the year, in anticipation of signing and funding the Ark transaction, which caused us to miss out on the fourth quarter equity market rally. Ian actually apologized to us for that yesterday, but we told him we'd do it again in a heartbeat, so. 2021, good year on an absolute basis and a relative basis. Fixed income portfolio outperformed the index as short-term interest rates began to increase, and our equity portfolio mostly kept up with a very strong S&P 500 return, driven primarily by solid results in our alternative asset portfolio.
Despite the market volatility that we've seen, we're off to a pretty good start in the first quarter of 2022. Solid results in our private equity portfolio have pretty much offset losses in the fixed income portfolio as interest rates have continued to increase. That volatility has obviously continued into the second quarter here, and we're continuing to outperform on a relative basis. I would say in summary that we're pleased with our investment returns over the past two-plus years, and going forward, we'll continue to look to maximize risk-adjusted returns. With that, I'll pause and hand it back to Manning.
Questions for Reid? Did this answer your question about investments? Yep. Okay. Home stretch. What to expect? More of the same. We're focused on growing our per share values over long periods of time, adhering to our core operating principles, which are unchanged, deploying and distributing capital intelligently, that's always on our minds and will be ever more so with the proceeds from the NSM transaction, and above all, thinking and acting like owners. Wise words here from Ben Graham that apply directly to our mission here at White Mountains, focused on growing adjusted book value per share with the full expectation that over the fullness of time, the share price will follow. Last slide. Skip back. There you go. Another bragging slide, which we'll just leave up here.
One thing I would note on this slide, if you bought the IPO at $25.75 a share in 1985 and you pocketed your dividends, you've made a 50 times return on your invested capital. Next stop is 100. I'm just not gonna tell you when. I'll stop there. We'll open for Q&A. We got one in the back, I think.
There are a couple questions from cyberspace.
Sure.
HG is the biggest and longest held investment of White Mountains. What's the potential future and upside?
Well, I'll take that, I guess, from a White Mountains perspective. I think where we are now is HG Re is producing probably a high single digits unlevered return on capital invested. If you assume a zero loss outcome, which is a big assumption, but I think the right assumption, and history to date would support that assumption, then I think there's more upside to downside from that on a running return basis from here as the tailwinds kick in. Anything you want to add?
What I'd say is we are going through right now a market that I think is gonna be for the medium term, favorable environment for us. Again, as a management team, we're committed to making sure that the economics of paying surplus notes, which is one of the key drivers, works well. To bear in mind, when we complete that goal, which we make a priority, the investment dynamics and attractiveness of the company multiply dramatically.
Next question.
As part of your capital management, how aggressive might White Mountains be in repurchasing shares?
Well, I think we've always been active repurchasers of shares in the right circumstances. I think you can look at what we did most recently post 2017 after the sale of OneBeacon, and get a sense for order of magnitude and pace. We'll see what the situation looks like. It depends a bit on what capital deployment opportunities present themselves and what the entire opportunity set looks like, including share repurchase. Anything you want to add to that, Reid?
No. I think that's appropriate.
The White Mountains shares are illiquid. Would the board consider a stock split?
Well, I guess I'll speak for the board. Jack always liked the share price high because he thought it kept the riffraff out. In all seriousness, I think the high share price is a factor, one of many that contribute to illiquidity, and we're happy to consider it. Not sure whether we'll get there on the change, but happy to take it under advisement. You had another question?
Just on buybacks. I want to hear your general philosophy.
On buybacks.
With respect to buybacks versus your general philosophy and strategy, I guess, with respect to buybacks versus dividends versus just, you know, keeping the optionality and, you know, retaining the cash at the parent in the absence of something really interesting to do with it.
It's a good question. It's a running judgment call. One thing I would say is when we're in a situation where we have some undeployed capital but not unlimited undeployed capital, we tend to just look at share repurchase or return of capital to shareholders in some form as an alternative investment to redeployment. We look at the economics of that activity over a defined return period, and we compare that to the deals that we might consider, which I think is the financially logical way to think about it, and we're very disciplined about it. When you're in a situation, let's say, where you have, what, to borrow a phrase from V.J. Dowling, you have excess capital.
Let's just say it's capital that I, for whatever reason, I have a crystal ball, and I can guarantee you that I would never be able to deploy it in the next five or 10 years, then I think we will move more aggressively to return it. Of course, the question is, where do you draw the line on your definition of excess? That, in turn, is sort of iterative. It depends on what opportunity set is in front of you and what the market looks like and how many Ark transactions are gonna walk in the door or what's there. This is a nuanced running decision that we take very seriously. It's probably the number one thing we focus on collectively as a senior team in discussing, debating and determining.
Either one of you wanna add something on that?
No. I think you said it well.
Other questions? Great. Let me thank everybody for being here. Nice to see you.