American International Group, Inc. (AIG): what the price assumes

In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $76.93, American International Group, Inc. (AIG) is priced for 9.3% return on equity. boothcheck publishes no house fair value, target price, or buy/sell rating; individual model outputs and user-controlled scenarios are analytical inputs, not Boothcheck targets. Narrative composed 2026-07-25.

Generated: 2026-08-30 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/AIG

Headline

FieldValue
TickerAIG
CompanyAmerican International Group, Inc.
Sector / IndustryFinancial Services
Current price$76.93/sh

What The Price Assumes (Inversion)

The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.

FieldValue
Inversion basisfinancials
Return on equity needed9.3%
Return on equity now7.5%
ROE gap+1.8pp
Price-to-book0.99x

Solve inputs: computed at a 9.4% cost of equity with 4% terminal growth over a 10-year stage, on common book equity (FY2026).

How unusual the bet is: within-range

ReferenceValue
vs own history+0.33σ
cohort percentile (of 78 peers)17
sustained it ~10 years at this level78%
implied end-window share0%

Valuation X-Ray

Asset, earnings-power and peer-multiple models all land far below the price; ONLY the growth-DCF reaches it. The bet is durable compounding the static frames structurally cannot price (a moat/durability premium).

How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.

FamilyMedian price/FVModelsReads
Asset1.25x3expensive
Earnings1.30x1expensive
Relative0
Growth1.12x2expensive

Families that justify the price: Growth

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 3.3%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=6)

ModelFamilyFVPrice/FVApplicableMethodology
DCF Perpetual GrowthGrowthno
Bank Fair Value (P/TBV)$40.491.90xyesTBVPS $71.11 × 0.57x (ROE (TTM) 7.3% / CoE 9.3%, g=4.8% (sustainable: 65% retention × ROE, 5% cap; not the terminal-growth assumption))
Relative ValuationRelativenoP/E 11x (static sector reference · 2026-04), scenarios: 9.3x / 11.0x / 12.7x (bear / base = reference held flat / bull), EV/EBITDA 10x
Simple DDMGrowth$111.530.69xyesDPS $2.01, g=7.3% (sustainable: ROE (TTM) × retention; not the terminal-growth assumption), ke=9.3%
Two-Stage DDMGrowth$49.731.55xyesStage 1: 11% for 5yr, Stage 2: 3.5% perpetual
Simple Excess ReturnAsset$61.401.25xyesBV/sh $77.66, ROE (TTM) 7.3%, ke 9.3%
Two-Stage Excess ReturnAsset$54.321.42xyes5yr excess ROE then converge to ke=9.3%
Discounted Future Market CapGrowthnoRev $26.6B, growth -4% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 1.3x / 1.5x / 1.7x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 8x)
Peter Lynch Fair ValueRelativenoEPS $5.48, growth 11% (input: historical EPS growth), PEG=1.23 (Fair)
Margin TrajectoryGrowthno
Earnings Power ValueEarningsno
Residual IncomeAssetno
Graham NumberAsset$97.850.79xyes√(22.5 × EPS $5.48 × BVPS $77.66) — Graham's conservative floor
EV/EBITDA RelativeRelativeno
FCF YieldEarningsno
SBC-Adj FCF YieldEarningsno
Ben Graham FormulaEarningsnoEPS $5.48 × (8.5 + 2×11.0%) × (4.4 / 5.3%)
ROIC-Justified P/BAssetno
P/Sales SectorRelativeno
PEG Fair ValueRelativenoEPS $5.48 × (PEG 1.5 × growth 11.0% (input: historical EPS growth)) → PE 16.5x
Earnings YieldEarnings$59.241.30xyesEPS $5.48 / required return 9.3% (Rf 4.3% + ERP 5.0%)
Funds From Operations MultipleRelativeno
Clinical Phase NPVGrowthno
MertonAssetno
V5 Mechanicalno

Economic-Unit Decomposition (Sum Of The Parts)

The issuer is a funded financial business. Debt, interest, and cash flows are operating inputs, so industrial EV, net-debt, WACC, and free-cash-flow lenses do not apply; value the common-equity claim with book, earnings, capital, and payout economics.

UnitRoleValuation basisRevenueReported profitValue evidenceStatus
North America Commercialfinancialequity$8.6bwithheldunresolved standalone equity facts required
International Commercialfinancialequity$8.6bwithheldunresolved standalone equity facts required
Global Personalfinancialequity$6.5bwithheldunresolved standalone equity facts required

No unit-level total common-equity value is stated. Each financial unit requires supported standalone common equity, normalized earnings, capital adequacy, and payout capacity. Consolidated debt, interest, and cash are operating balances, not an enterprise-to-equity bridge; company-level book, earnings, capital, and payout lenses remain the coherent cross-checks.

Solvency

FieldValue
Share count CAGR (buyback)-9.7%

Deposit/float-funded balance sheet: debt is funding, not corporate leverage, and GAAP operating cash flow follows loan flows. Net-debt, interest-coverage, and cash-burn lenses do not apply. The solvency frame for a financial is regulatory capital and payout capacity (CET1, stress buffer, dividends plus buybacks against earnings).

Bullet Takeaways

Bull Case

Read this company at the stage it is actually in and most of the confusion goes away. It is no longer a financial conglomerate assembling parts, and it is not a growth story. It is a mature property-casualty underwriter, which means the number that matters is the combined ratio, the share of every premium dollar consumed by claims and expenses. Below 100 the underwriting itself makes money and the investment portfolio is pure gravy. Above 100 the investments are subsidizing the underwriting. For 2025 the 10-K reports it "Delivered $2.3 billion of underwriting income, a 22 percent increase from the prior year. Produced strong combined ratio of 90.1."

The improvement is concentrated where it counts most. "North America Commercial produced underwriting income of $1.1 billion from a combined ratio of 86.8, which was a 6.5 point improvement", roughly half the group's underwriting profit for the year out of one segment. More telling than the headline is the accident-year figure, the version that strips out catastrophes and any movement in reserves set aside for older claims: it has sat near 88 for three consecutive years. Selection and pricing discipline never show up in a revenue line. They show up here, years later, in what the claims actually cost.

Then there is what happens to the profit once it exists. In 2025 "AIG Parent repurchased approximately 73 million shares of AIG Common Stock for an aggregate purchase price of $5.8 billion", and the 10-K reports $3.8 billion still available under the board's authorization as of February 6, 2026. Across four years the share count has come down about 10% annually. That is a rate of retirement most large financials never approach, and it is why per-share results have improved faster than the business underneath them. Whatever the underwriting produces, a steadily smaller number of shares divide it.

The first quarter of 2026 extended all of it. The General Insurance combined ratio came in at 87.3%, an 850 basis point improvement on the year, and underwriting income in that segment more than tripled to $774 million, with net premiums written up 24% on a reported basis and 18% in constant currency. The board raised the quarterly dividend 11% to $0.50 a share at the same time. Volume is being added inorganically as well, through the purchase of Everest's "global retail commercial insurance portfolios for an aggregate purchase price of $301 million", which buys premium rather than building it.

The obvious objection is scale. Chubb reports that in 2025 "consolidated net premiums earned (NPE) was $53.0 billion", several times AIG's book, and scale in commercial insurance buys data, distribution and reinsurance terms. That is fair, and the bull case does not dispute it. The argument is narrower and more mechanical than out-competing anyone: an underwriter running in the high eighties, retiring a tenth of its own equity every year, valued at roughly the book value of that equity, only has to keep doing what its accident-year results say it has already been doing across three consecutive years.

Bear Case

An insurer's balance sheet is mostly an opinion. The largest liability on it is a reserve for claims that have happened but have not yet been reported, settled or paid, and that number is an actuarial estimate about events nobody has seen the bill for. When insurers get into trouble, this is almost always where it starts, and the 10-K shows the estimate moving in both directions at once. Net of external reinsurance, 2025 brought "favorable prior year loss reserve development of $216 million, net of external reinsurance but before ADC cessions", helped by workers' compensation. Against that, "Unfavorable development on Businesses in run-off of $196 million is primarily attributed to Asbestos development of $85 million, which is entirely ceded under the LPT". Net favorable, yes, but thin, and propped up by reinsurance arrangements that transfer the tail rather than eliminate it.

That matters because of what the shares already assume. At roughly book value, the price requires the company to sustain a return on equity around 9.8%. It earned 7.5% last year. The gap is not enormous, but the direction of the arithmetic is unforgiving: if the return settles nearer where it has actually been than where the price needs it, the multiple that return supports drops below book value, and the shares reprice down to it. There is no growth premium in this security to cushion that. The valuation is the return, and nothing else.

The bigger structural problem is that the tool doing most of the work cannot close the gap. Retiring a tenth of the share count each year raises earnings per share and book value per share proportionally, but buying stock at roughly book value neither creates nor destroys book value per share. It concentrates the same return over fewer shares without improving the return itself. Only underwriting profit and investment income can move that number. A buyback is arithmetic, not alchemy, and at this multiple it is close to neutral arithmetic.

Meanwhile the underwriting result being extrapolated is a cycle number. The 10-K states the position without decoration: "the property and casualty insurance markets are historically cyclical and experience periods of relatively strong premium rates followed by periods of increased competition that drive premium rates down". Commercial rates have been firm; combined ratios in the high eighties are what a firm market produces. When capacity returns and pricing softens, the loss ratio moves before anyone announces that the cycle has turned, and the first evidence usually arrives as accident-year deterioration a year or two after the pricing decision that caused it.

Sitting on top of both is exposure that is not diversifiable. The filing notes the business "is exposed to various catastrophic events, including natural disasters, man-made catastrophes, or pandemic disease, in which multiple losses can occur", and the same document warns that a downgrade of the insurance financial strength ratings "could result in a downgrade of AIG Parent's credit ratings". Ratings are the license to write large commercial risks; the risk here is not a bad quarter but a bad quarter that costs the company access to the business it wants to write.

Valuation

Insurers are not valued on a multiple of earnings so much as on what they earn against the capital sitting behind the policies. On that basis the shares trade at about 1.04 times book value, and a price at book is a specific statement: it says the market expects the company to earn roughly its cost of capital, no more. Run the arithmetic backwards and the return on equity the current level requires is about 9.8%. The 10-K reports the company "Achieved Return on equity of 7.5 percent" for 2025. The whole security sits in that gap.

There is a serious argument that the gap is smaller than it looks. The company also publishes a core operating version of that measure, stripping out investment marks, deferred tax assets and its remaining holding in Corebridge, on the theory that those items obscure how the insurance business itself is performing. On that basis 2025 came in at 11.1 percent, and the first quarter of 2026 annualized higher still. Whether the reported figure or the adjusted one is the better guide to the next five years is not a technicality. It is the entire disagreement, and a buyer at this level is implicitly siding with the adjusted number.

The methods used to triangulate the business split along exactly that line. Book value plus profitability lands moderately below the current level, because it applies the trailing return, which sits under the cost of equity, to the equity base. Capitalizing current earnings at a required return lands close to the price. The forward-growth lens lands below it, which is unsurprising for a business whose premium base is not compounding. What is absent is any lens that reaches well above the price on the strength of expected growth. This is a value-supported name rather than a growth bet, and the disagreement among methods is about the durability of a return, not the size of a runway.

Against the group, the shares sit in the lower half of the peer set on price to book. Chubb, at "consolidated net premiums earned (NPE) was $53.0 billion" in 2025, operates on a different scale and is valued accordingly. The discount is not mysterious: cohort members earning more on their capital command more of it.

For a financial, the balance-sheet question is not leverage but how much capital the company can hand back and still write the business it wants. In 2025 "AIG Parent repurchased approximately 73 million shares of AIG Common Stock for an aggregate purchase price of $5.8 billion", with $3.8 billion still authorized as of February 6, 2026, and the quarterly dividend was raised 11% to $0.50 a share in the spring. Four years of that has taken the share count down roughly a tenth a year. It is a genuinely large capital return, and it is also the reason the reported return on equity has not fallen further: a shrinking equity base flatters the denominator even when the numerator is only holding steady.

Catalysts

The April 30 first-quarter report was the strongest single quarter of the current cycle and it moved on the one line that matters. General Insurance produced a combined ratio of 87.3%, an 850 basis point improvement year over year, and underwriting income in the segment more than tripled to $774 million, up 219%. Stripping out catastrophes and reserve movements, the accident-year figure improved 120 basis points to 86.6%. Most of the headline improvement came from a light catastrophe quarter set against a heavy one a year earlier, which is worth holding in mind; the accident-year move is the part that reflects underwriting rather than weather.

Volume moved too. Net premiums written rose 24% on a reported basis and 18% in constant currency, which for a mature commercial underwriter is a large step and reflects both the Everest portfolio purchase and organic growth. Reported results per diluted share came in at $1.41 on a GAAP basis and $2.11 on the company's adjusted after-tax measure, the latter up 80% on the year. Book value per common share stood at $75.82 at the end of March. Capital returned in the quarter totaled $760 million, split $519 million of repurchases and $241 million of dividends, and the board lifted the quarterly dividend 11% to $0.50 a share.

Second-quarter results are due after the close on Thursday, August 6, 2026, with the call the following morning. Two things are worth watching in it rather than the headline. The first is whether the accident-year combined ratio holds in the mid-eighties without help from a quiet catastrophe season, since that is the measure that tells you about pricing rather than luck. The second is the pace of buybacks against the remaining authorization, because at a valuation near book value the repurchase is a capital-allocation choice with a real alternative, and how management weighs it says more than the quarter itself.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

North America Commercial (reported)

International Commercial (reported)

Global Personal (reported)

Methodology Note

Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.

Sources

company earnings-date announcement, July 2026 · Q1 2026 results release, April 30, 2026

View the full interactive AIG report on boothcheck