MetLife Inc. (MET)
Financials · NYSE · US
Fundamentals
Valuation and ratings
MetLife Inc. trades at $93.70, which is 112% below the $199.05 our discounted cash flow model puts on the business. On that measure alone it screens as undervalued, though a DCF is an argument rather than a measurement, and the market is frequently right about why something is cheap.
Our moat model scores it 36 out of 100, which is little in the way of a moat. A moat is a structural reason competitors cannot take the profits away, and it matters more to a long holding period than any single quarter's numbers do.
It changes hands at 17.7 times earnings. Be careful reading that in isolation: for a cyclical business a low P/E arrives at the top of the cycle, when profits are peaking and about to fall, which is exactly when the shares look cheapest and are not.
About MetLife Inc.
MetLife, Inc., a financial services company, provides insurance, annuities, employee benefits, and asset management services worldwide. It operates in six segments: Group Benefits; Retirement and Income Solutions; Asia; Latin America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and MetLife Holdings. The company offers life, dental, group short-and long-term disability, paid family and medical leave, individual disability, accidental death and dismemberment, accident and health, vision, and pet insurance, as well as prepaid legal plans; administrative services-only arrangements to employers; and general and separate account, and synthetic guaranteed interest contracts, as well as private floating rate funding agreements. It also provides pension risk transfers, institutional income annuities, structured settlements, and capital markets investment products; and other products and services, such as life insurance products and funding agreements for funding postretirement benefits, as well as company, bank, or trust-owned life insurance used to finance nonqualified benefit programs for executives. In addition, it offers fixed, indexed-linked, and variable annuities; pension products; regular savings products; whole and term life, endowments, universal and variable life, and group life products; longevity and funded reinsurance solutions; credit insurance products; accident & health products covering hospitalization, cancer, critical illness, income protection, and scheduled medical reimbursement plans; and protection against long-term health care services. The company was incorporated in 1999 and is based in New York, New York.
MET passes 3 of our 30 screens today
Each screen prints the exact criteria it used, and the circumstances in which it is wrong.
Smart money ownership
14 of the funds we track reported a position in their latest SEC 13F filing. Largest first:
- Dodge & Cox, DODGE & COX$3.61B · 2.0% of book
- Richard Pzena, PZENA INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT LLC$799.41M · 2.6% of book
- Cliff Asness, AQR CAPITAL MANAGEMENT LLC$253.88M · 0.1% of book
- Arrowstreet Capital, ARROWSTREET CAPITAL, LIMITED PARTNERSHIP$219.14M · 0.1% of book
- Ken Griffin, CITADEL ADVISORS LLC$80.11M · 0.0% of book
A word of warning on reading these figures: a 13F reports the market value of a holding, so a fund that traded nothing at all still appears to have sold when the price fell. We found 102 companies where the standard reading gives the opposite answer. Only the share count is honest.
Common questions
Is MetLife Inc. (MET) undervalued?
Against our discounted cash flow estimate of $199.05, MET at $93.70 is 112% below fair value. That is one model's answer, not a recommendation, and most of a DCF's output sits in a terminal value nobody can forecast.
Which funds own MET?
14 of the institutions we track reported a position in MET in their most recent SEC 13F filing. A 13F is filed up to 45 days after quarter end, so it tells you what a fund held then, not what it holds now.
What is MET's P/E ratio?
MET trades at 17.7 times earnings. A low P/E is not automatically cheap: on a cyclical company it is usually a warning that earnings are at a peak.
The full research page for MET, with financial statements, ownership detail, peer comparison and alerts, is free inside the app.
Data from company filings, exchange quotes and SEC EDGAR 13F disclosures. Quotes are delayed. Metrics we do not have are left out rather than estimated. Educational information, not financial advice.