Chubb Limited (CB): what the price assumes

In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $339.92, Chubb Limited (CB) is priced for 11.7% 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/CB

Headline

FieldValue
TickerCB
CompanyChubb Limited
Sector / IndustryFinancial Services
Current price$339.92/sh
CompositionOverseas General Insurance 64% / Global Reinsurance 6% / Life Insurance 31%

What The Price Assumes (Inversion)

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

FieldValue
Inversion basisfinancials
Return on equity needed11.7%
Return on equity now14.0%
ROE gap-2.3pp
Price-to-book1.79x

Solve inputs: computed at a 8.3% 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+0.41σ
cohort percentile (of 78 peers)50
sustained it ~10 years at this level71%
implied end-window share0%

Valuation X-Ray

The price is supported by asset-based and earnings-power value. A value/asset-supported name, not a pure growth bet.

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
Asset0.98x3justifies
Earnings1.11x1expensive
Relative0
Growth0

Families that justify the price: Asset, Earnings

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 8.3%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=4)

ModelFamilyFVPrice/FVApplicableMethodology
DCF Perpetual GrowthGrowthno
Bank Fair Value (P/TBV)$295.301.15xyesTBVPS $121.70 × 2.43x (ROE (TTM) 15.3% / CoE 9.3%, g=5.0% (sustainable: 65% retention × ROE, 5% cap; not the terminal-growth assumption))
Relative ValuationRelativenoP/E 11x (static sector reference · 2026-04), scenarios: 9.1x / 11.0x / 12.9x (bear / base = reference held flat / bull), EV/EBITDA 10x
Simple DDMGrowthno
Two-Stage DDMGrowthno
Simple Excess ReturnAsset$314.941.08xyesBV/sh $190.24, ROE (TTM) 15.3%, ke 9.3%
Two-Stage Excess ReturnAsset$400.280.85xyes5yr excess ROE then converge to ke=9.3%
Discounted Future Market CapGrowthnoRev $60.8B, growth 8% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 1.8x / 2.2x / 2.5x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 8x)
Peter Lynch Fair ValueRelativenoEPS $28.27, growth 35% (input: historical EPS growth), PEG=0.33 (Undervalued)
Margin TrajectoryGrowthno
Earnings Power ValueEarningsno
Residual IncomeAssetno
Graham NumberAsset$347.860.98xyes√(22.5 × EPS $28.27 × BVPS $190.24) — Graham's conservative floor
EV/EBITDA RelativeRelativeno
FCF YieldEarningsno
SBC-Adj FCF YieldEarningsno
Ben Graham FormulaEarningsnoEPS $28.27 × (8.5 + 2×15.0%) × (4.4 / 5.3%)
ROIC-Justified P/BAssetno
P/Sales SectorRelativeno
PEG Fair ValueRelativenoEPS $28.27 × (PEG 1.5 × growth 25.0% (input: historical EPS growth)) → PE 37.5x
Earnings YieldEarnings$305.621.11xyesEPS $28.27 / 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 Commercial P&C Insurancefinancialequity$21.3bwithheldunresolved standalone equity facts required
North America Personal P&C Insurancefinancialequity$7.0bwithheldunresolved standalone equity facts required
North America Agricultural Insurancefinancialequity$2.9bwithheldunresolved standalone equity facts required
Overseas General Insurancefinancialequity$15.0bwithheldunresolved standalone equity facts required
Global Reinsurancefinancialequity$1.3bwithheldunresolved standalone equity facts required
Life Insurancefinancialequity$7.3bwithheldunresolved 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)-2.1%

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

Here is the part that does not fit the story. Chubb has been earning a return on equity of roughly 14%, which is a strong result in a capital-heavy, cyclical business where capital gets tied up against promises that may not come due for years. A stock trading near 1.9 times book value would normally say the market has run well ahead of that. Work the multiple backwards, though, and what it actually asks for is a sustained return on equity of about 12.4%. The price wants less than the business is delivering, which is an unusual position for a company this size to be in.

What makes the return possible is that Chubb makes money on the insurance itself, not only on the investments. The FY2025 10-K sets the bar plainly: A P&C combined ratio under 100 percent indicates underwriting income. In the second quarter of 2026 the P&C combined ratio came to 83.8%, against 85.6% a year earlier. Roughly sixteen cents of profit on every premium dollar, before a single dollar of investment income lands. That is what lets an insurer earn a mid-teens return without reaching for risk in the bond portfolio.

The growth engine is in an unexpected place. The 10-K reports Life Insurance net premiums written up 15.1 percent, or 17.3 percent in constant dollars, due to growth in international life of 17.4 percent in constant dollars. Overseas, growth in Asia came partly from buying Liberty Mutual's property and casualty business in Thailand, and Latin America grew on personal lines including automobile in Mexico, per the same filing. An American commercial insurer whose momentum is consumer and life business in Asia and Latin America is not the company most investors picture, and it is the reason the underwriting result does not live or die on the US commercial pricing cycle.

Reach is the moat, and it is expensive to replicate. WRB, the closest listed comparison on international footprint, describes itself in its own 10-K as operating with branches or offices in 52 cities outside the United States, in Asia, Australia, Canada, Continental Europe, Mexico, Scandinavia, South America, and the United Kingdom. Licences, local capital, and claims infrastructure in dozens of jurisdictions take decades to assemble, and a multinational client buying one policy that works everywhere has few places to shop.

The capital return says management agrees with the arithmetic. In May the board raised the dividend for the 33rd consecutive year, to $4.08 a share annually, and authorized a new repurchase program of 7.5 billion dollars. The share count has fallen about 2.1% a year across the last four years. About half of earnings goes out the door as dividends plus buybacks, roughly 50.4%, which leaves the other half retained inside a business earning well above its cost of capital. Retained capital compounding at 14% is worth more than the same capital paid out, and the split shows management knows which half is which.

Bear Case

An insurer's balance sheet is mostly an opinion. The largest liability is a reserve for claims that have happened but have not yet been reported, settled or fully understood, and the largest asset is a bond portfolio whose value moves with interest rates the company does not control. Neither is a fact in the way a restaurant's rent is a fact. The 10-K is candid about how the reserve gets built: for claims incurred but not reported, we use historical experience and other statistical information, and the expected loss ratio for each origin year is selected after consideration of a number of factors, including historical loss ratios adjusted for rate changes, premium and loss trends, industry benchmarks. That is a careful, professional process. It is still an estimate, and estimates move.

The direction they have been moving deserves attention. The 10-K attributes the 2025 combined ratio improvement to lower catastrophe losses, partially offset by lower favorable prior period development. Translated: fewer disasters helped, and the reserve releases from earlier years helped less than they used to. Favorable development is a real earnings contributor for a well-reserved insurer, and when it shrinks, the current year's underwriting has to carry more of the result on its own.

Catastrophe exposure is the second structural item, and the filing does not soften it. Catastrophic events are inherently unpredictable and the actual nature of such events, when they occur, could be more frequent or severe than contemplated in our pricing and risk management expectations, and the company states it has substantial exposure to losses resulting from man-made catastrophes including terrorism, cyber-attack, financial events, and other catastrophe events, including pandemics. The second quarter of 2026 absorbed $475 million of pre-tax catastrophe losses and still produced an 83.8% combined ratio. That is what a benign quarter looks like. The distribution of bad quarters has a long tail, and a single season can move several points of combined ratio.

Which connects to what the price requires. At about 1.9 times book, the market is assuming a sustained return on equity near 12.4%, held indefinitely. That sits comfortably inside what the company is producing at the moment, which is why the multiple does not look stretched against a single year of results. Widen the window to the full nineteen years of record, however, and the average sits lower, just under eleven percent. So the price is not underwriting today's result; it is underwriting something between today's result and that long-run average, permanently. If returns drift back toward the average, the price-to-book the market supports compresses toward book, and that compression needs no scandal and no blowup. A few years of harder catastrophe experience or thinner reserve releases would do it.

The tax base is the quiet one. Chubb is domiciled in Switzerland, and the 10-K notes that in connection with the global minimum tax rules Switzerland has enacted aspects of these rules, effective on January 1, 2025, including the income inclusion rule, with subsequent OECD guidance capable of putting more tax on the table. Nothing about that threatens solvency. It does chip at the after-tax return, and after-tax return is precisely the variable the price is capitalizing.

Valuation

Book value, not earnings, is the honest lens for a business like this one, because an insurer is worth the return it earns on the capital it must hold against the promises it has written. Chubb trades at roughly 1.9 times book. Read backwards, that price assumes a sustained return on equity near 12.4%. Recent performance has run around 14%, and the nineteen-year average sits closer to 10.9%. The assumption lands between what the company has averaged over two decades and what it is producing today, which is an unusually undramatic answer for a company this size.

The methods do not argue with each other here, and that agreement is the finding. Every family of approach reaches today's price. The asset-value approaches start from reported book value per share, $186.99, and then add the value of the excess return the company earns on that capital above what the capital costs. Those come out within a few percent of today's quote, and the forward-growth approach lands beside them. The earnings-power lens, which capitalizes the $28.27 of trailing earnings per share at a required return and credits no growth at all, comes out above the price. The peer-multiple approaches span a wide range depending on what growth rate is fed into them, but the plain sector-earnings comparison, which applies the sector's current earnings multiple with no growth adjustment at all, sits essentially on top of the price as well. When the value-oriented lenses support a price rather than fighting it, the bet is not about the durability of a growth narrative. It is about whether the underwriting results and the reserve estimates behind them are what they appear to be.

Scale is the part of the competitive picture that shows up in the numbers rather than the prose. TRV reported $48.9 billion of revenue over its trailing year; ALL reported $68.2 billion and AIG $26.6 billion. Chubb sits among the largest names in that group, and its price-to-book sits in the upper half of it. Paying an above-median multiple for an above-median return is not a contradiction; it is the market doing arithmetic. What it does mean is that there is no valuation discount absorbing a bad year.

Capital return is where the balance-sheet question actually lives for an insurer. There is no leverage ratio worth quoting here, because a P&C insurer's debt is not the constraint; claims-paying capacity and regulatory capital are. On that measure the picture is straightforward. Dividends plus buybacks return about 50.4% of earnings, the share count has fallen roughly 2.1% a year over four years, and the retained half compounds book value for a shrinking base of owners. Of firms earning this kind of return, roughly 69% held it for a decade. That is a comparatively forgiving base rate, and it is the arithmetic reason the methods land where they do rather than scattering.

Catalysts

The July print was a clean one. Second-quarter 2026 net income came to $2.85 billion, or $7.30 a share, with consolidated net premiums written of $14.7 billion, up 3.6%, and a P&C combined ratio of 83.8% against 85.6% a year earlier. Catastrophe losses in the quarter were $475 million pre-tax. The number worth watching is not the profit but the premium line: first-quarter net premiums written grew 10.7% to $14.0 billion, so the growth rate roughly halved between the two quarters. Commercial pricing that softens shows up in written premium long before it shows up in the combined ratio.

Capital return got its annual reset in May. The board raised the dividend for the 33rd consecutive year, to $4.08 a share annually, and authorized a new repurchase program of 7.5 billion dollars. For a company retaining roughly half its earnings, the size of that authorization is the clearest signal available about where management thinks capital is best deployed, and a buyback at a multiple near current book is a different decision from a buyback at twice it.

The reinsurance arm changed hands at the top just before earnings, with James Wixtead named Executive Chairman of Chubb Tempest Re and Michael O'Donnell promoted to President of the group. Reinsurance is the smallest of the reported segments and the most exposed to catastrophe volatility, which makes leadership continuity there more consequential than the segment's size suggests. The next scheduled information event is the third-quarter report, which will be the first to carry the bulk of Atlantic hurricane season.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

North America Commercial P&C Insurance / North America Personal P&C Insurance / Global Reinsurance (reported)

North America Agricultural Insurance (reported)

Overseas General Insurance (reported)

Life Insurance (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

Q2 2026 earnings release, July 21, 2026 · company announcement, May 21, 2026 · Q1 2026 earnings release, April 21, 2026 · company announcement, July 20, 2026

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