I wrote up Esquire Financial Holdings (NASDAQ: ESQ) a little over three years ago and have been tracking its performance since. While I didn’t have money to invest in it at the time, I did think it was a great business because of its competitive advantages versus the competition, its niche focus on the litigation market, its room to grow in to that market, its real estate lending portfolio, and, to a lesser extent, its healthy source of non-interest income in the form of payment processing for credit card companies.
I thought three years was enough time to do a comprehensive review of the bank’s performance and see how things have worked out. So, let’s take a look.
Stock Price Performance
My favorite Warren Buffett quote is, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” At the end of the day, you want outperformance versus the S&P 500 if you’re going to be a stock picker. Let’s take a gander at Esquire’s stock price performance since my original two-part writeup back in September of 2022.
The screencap below was taken from TIKR. For transparency, I had to use Vanguard’s S&P500 ETF as a proxy. It’s the best I could do because TIKR doesn’t track the pure S&P500 Index for some reason. Please note that Esquire’s performance is the orange line while the S&P500 ETF is the blue line.
The bank has really hit its stride, and its stock price has compounded at over 35% a year since my original writeup. Esquire has benefited from the two critical factors that every business needs to have its stock price outperform. The first is that earnings have increased greatly. The second is that the market now pays a higher multiple for those earnings. The earnings multiple on the stock three years ago was 10x or so. Now, it’s above 18x. Both factors have worked in tandem to produce outperformance versus the S&P 500.
The remainder of Part 1 of this writeup will focus on the CEO, his compensation, and what Esquire’s does to keep the lights on. Part 2, which will be a posted two days after Part 1, focuses on Ratio Analysis, Valuation, Risks, and Tailwinds.
CEO
Andrew Sagliocca was and still is the Chief Executive Officer of Esquire Financial Holdings.
CEO Compensation
In my original writeup I noted that Mr. Sagliocca’s compensation was comprised of a base salary, bonus, stock awards, and “other compensation” which I didn’t mention because it was immaterial to his overall compensation. There wasn’t much in terms of specifics given outside of his base salary. The Compensation Committee was able to use almost any kind of performance metric, both quantitative and qualitative, to issue bonuses and stock awards to the CEO.
Luckily, there have been more disclosures in the three years since my original writeup. I found something while reading the Proxy Statements that I hadn’t come across before. More on that in a bit.
Salary
The CEO’s compensation has changed a bit over the last three years. He still earns a base salary which increased from $672,000 in 2022 to $825,000 in 2025. In addition to this he’s now eligible for an Annual Incentive Plan and Long-Term Incentives.
