By Carlos Pallordet

March 3 - (The Insurer) - The North American insurance composite compiled by Stonybrook Capital and Weild & Co rose 5.6% last week, outpacing all major Wall Street benchmarks.

The S&P 500 closed the week down 1.0% while the Nasdaq-100 fell 3.4%.

The small-cap Russell 2000 benchmark lost 1.5% last week and is now down 3.0% for the year to date.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average remained in positive territory last week with an increase of 1.0%.

Stonybrook-Weild noted that stock markets remained on an overall downward trend throughout February, despite a rally on Friday.

“In the bond market, US Treasury yields declined due to weaker economic data and policy uncertainty (by over 20 bps on the 2-year Treasury). Credit spreads widened moderately,” they highlighted.

The investment banks also noted that while the core personal consumption expenditures index had positively surprised in January, personal spending had increased by 0.7%, exceeding expectations.

They highlighted that the price of gold had soared 40% since the start of 2024, noting that “some analysts relate gold prices and inflation expectations”.

In the North American insurance composite, advancers led decliners by 93 to 17, with all industry groups rising in the week.

The two best-performing groups were coastal insurers, up 8.3%, and global P&C, up 7.7%.

Among the latter, AIG was the top performer with an 8.2% increase for the week.

Shares in Berkshire Hathaway, which on February 22 reported a 66% jump in underwriting profits for 2024, rose 7.8%.

Meanwhile, Chubb added 6.8%.

The group of standard commercial insurers also experienced strong price momentum, with shares rising 6.8% on average.

United Fire Group, Selective Insurance and Cincinnati Financial recorded the largest gains in the cohort, increasing 10.2%, 9.6% and 9.4%, respectively.

Travelers, the largest company in the group by market capitalisation, rose by 7.7%, while CNA Financial was the only constituent to end the month in negative territory with a fall of 0.5%.

Meanwhile, the group of reinsurers added 5.1% on average last week.

SiriusPoint registered the biggest increase with its shares climbing 9.6%, followed by Reinsurance Group of America with a 7.0% gain.

Shares in leader Everest Group climbed 4.8%.

The group of brokers was up 4.0% for the week on average, with all four constituents advancing.

Aon topped the gains with its shares rising 5.0%, followed by WTW with an increase of 4.2%.

The Stonybrook-Weild North American Insurance composite is up 9.3% 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.