The Bear Cave published a short thesis on Kinsale Capital Group this week. I haven't paid for the full piece, so I'm responding to what's publicly available. I'll address other claims in the next article. If any of them hold up under scrutiny, I'll say so.

But the public case has a problem.

The centerpiece of the argument is a customer complaint filed with a state insurance regulator. One complaint. Against an insurance company that writes coverage for hundreds of thousands of small businesses. Litigation and coverage disputes are not exceptions in this business. They are the business. Citing a single regulatory complaint as evidence of systemic fraud is like citing one traffic ticket to argue a city has a crime crisis.

Here's what Bear Cave didn't mention. The NAIC, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the regulatory body that oversees the insurance industry, publishes a normalized complaint index for every insurer in the country. It's free. It's public. It takes about three minutes to find.

The industry average is 1.00. Kinsale scored 0.31 in 2025. Even lower in 2024. That means Kinsale generates less than one-third the complaints of the average insurer relative to their premium volume. Seven total confirmed complaints against $1.45 billion in annual premium.

This is the authoritative, standardized measure of exactly what Bear Cave was trying to argue, and it points in the opposite direction.

Bear Cave is a smart publication and this may be a case of a man with a hammer looking for a nail. There is a real bear case for Kinsale. It's just not this one. The actual headwind is a softening E&S market and the valuation compression that comes when a high-multiple compounder stops growing at 30% annually. That's the central debate.

What's not worth having is a debate built on cherry-picked complaint files while ignoring the three-minute database search that directly contradicts them.

To be fair, I haven't read the full piece. It's possible the paywalled portion addresses these claims more rigorously. But the public-facing argument, the one designed to spread the thesis, rests on a dramatized complaint that collapses on contact with a free government database.