US insurance stocks composite in positive territory despite fourth consecutive week of Wall Street losses

By Carlos Pallordet

March 17 - (The Insurer) - The North American insurance composite, compiled by investment banks Stonybrook and Weild & Co rose 1.2% in the week to Friday, as all major Wall Street benchmarks continued to decline in the current stock market sell-off.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 3.1% in the week, while the S&P 500 lost 2.3%.

Meanwhile, the Nasdaq-100 slid 2.5% in the week, compounding a 6.2% fall in the year to date.

The Russell 2000 was down 1.5% in the week and was trading 8.3% down for the year to date.

“It was a deep-down week overall but not as bad as had been feared going into Friday,” said Stonybrook-Weild.

Stonybrook-Weild reported a remarkable rebound in the Dow on Friday, with the index climbing more than 650 points. This surge was fuelled by investors pursuing bargain opportunities, demonstrating their confidence in the long-term economic outlook, said the report. The report also highlighted an improvement in market sentiment, largely due to the passage of a funding bill that successfully averted a government shutdown.

“Prior to Friday’s ‘Dead Cat Bounce’ each of the indices was down over 4%, which would have been the worst week since 2022,” they added.

However, the investment banks highlighted the U.S. stock market had lost $5 trillion in value in three weeks, while the U.S. debt and deficit problem had worsened “as the budget shortfall through February passed the $1 trillion mark even though the fiscal year is not yet at the halfway point".

In the North American insurance composite, companies with rising share prices outstripped those seeing declines by 62 to 46, with five out of the 12 peer groups advancing in the week.

The two best performing groups were coastal insurers, up 4.4%, and global P&C, up 3.6%.

Among the latter, Berkshire Hathaway led the gains, with shares trading up 3.8%, partially recovering from a 4.1% decline in the previous week.

AIG's share price rose by 2.0%, reversing a 1.7% loss from the prior week, while Chubb gained 2.6%, building on its previous week's 0.4% increase.

Personal lines insurers also outperformed, rising 3.3% as a group.

Progressive and Allstate, the two largest companies in the cohort by market capitalisation, saw their stock prices end the week up 3.4%.

Mercury General gained 6.5% while Root and Kingstone Companies led the gains in the cohort with a rise of 13.3% and 11.5%, respectively.

At the other end of the spectrum, the group of reinsurers saw a muted performance, with shares sliding by 0.7%.

Leader Everest Group lost 1.4% while shares in RenaissanceRe fell by 1.7%.

Greenlight Capital and Conduit Holdings saw the biggest drops in the group, falling 5.2% and 1.8%, respectively.

Meanwhile, global brokers were down 1.0% on average, having lost 2.1% in the previous week.

WTW saw the largest drop, with its share price down 1.9% followed by Marsh McLennan which was down 1.7%.

Arthur J Gallagher, which had been the biggest faller in the previous week with a decline of 4.1%, eked out a gain of 0.4%.

The two worst-performing groups in the composite were other broker and distributors, down 2.3%, and insurance service providers, down 1.3%.

The Stonybrook-Weild North American Insurance composite is up 7.7% on a year-to-date basis.

In this article, we have included a selection of industry comp tables published in full by Stonybrook and Weild & Co in their weekly update.