Top 10 Retail Life and Annuity Issuer Stocks

Retail life and annuity stocks have been outperforming the rest of the market. Worries about rising interest rates pushed the S&P 500 index down 14.16% during the 1-year period ending Wednesday. At the top 10 retail life and annuity issuers, share prices fell an average of just 0.31%. The gap was also wide for 10-year share price performance. For the six retail life and annuity issuers that have had their own publicly traded shares throughout the decade, share prices have increased an average of 240.96%. That compares with an increase of just 178.74% for the S&P 500. For a look at the stock performance of the 10 biggest retail life and annuity issuer stocks, selected and ranked based on market capitalization values, see the gallery above.

What It Means

Investors have accepted the argument that rising interest rates will be hard on most companies but good for life insurers' bond portfolio earnings. That supports the idea that life insurers should be able to provide the benefits they have promised your clients.

Details

A "market capitalization" value is the amount of cash needed to buy all of a company's shares of stock at the current price. In U.S. stock performance tables, the 14 insurance organizations with the biggest market cap values are health insurers, property and casualty insurers, insurance brokers, private equity firms with large insurance arms, or companies that focus on serving the employee benefits market. To compile the gallery above, we looked solely at companies that are actively selling individual life insurance, individual annuities or both, directly to ordinary retail customers in the United States. If KKR, the parent of Global Atlantic, were on this list, it would have ranked first, with a market cap of about $43 billion. Apollo Global Management, the parent of Athene, would have ranked below Prudential Financial, with a market cap of $36.91 billion. The 10 retail life and annuity issuers that are in the gallery have a combined market cap of $131 billion, which is about the same as the net worth of Lithuania or Ghana, according to national wealth data estimates in the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2022.