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It is often said that if you have a great underwriting team, the timing of a start-up (re)insurer is immaterial - soft markets or hard markets may affect its initial growth prospects, but should make no difference to its long-term chances success or failure.

Human psychology being what it is, however, great waves of company launches have traditionally followed major loss events.

Perhaps this phenomenon explains why the attritional but not particularly catastrophic 2004 year brought just one major new reinsurer, Swiss-based Glacier Re.

Given what was to come in 2005, some could say that fortune didn't favour Glacier. But, having just started to put business on the books, the firm was not fully exposed to the worst that KRW had to offer and had the advantage of a substantial head start on the class of 2005 that was to follow.

After all, following a fresh capital injection the firm had underwriting teams in place, a licence from a respected jurisdiction and an extremely hard property catastrophe market to work with.
Almost six years on and the solitary "class of 2004" is no more in the market after being unofficially on the market for approximately a year-and-a half.

This column does not wish to analyse or pass judgment on the relative merits of Glacier's managerial teams and compare returns on capital with those of its peers.

However, perhaps more worryingly, what we can infer is that, having thoroughly sounded the market for a possible trade sale, investors concluded that Glacier Re was worth more to them dead than alive.

And in a market that is finding precious few P&C (re)insurers able to command any kind of premium to net asset value, the prospect of redundancy is a real and chilling thought for underwriters everywhere.

Indeed, if others follow the Glacier lead, the next hardening market may not be ushered in with its traditional bang, but rather the whimper of slow capital withdrawal.