American International Group Inc

American International Group shares have fallen 5.9% over the past six months to $79.39, underperforming the S&P 500's 8.4% gain. Analysts at StockStory cite three reasons to avoid the stock: revenue declined 9.1% annually over the last five years, net premiums earned fell 4.7% annually over the same period, and book value per share grew only 8.3% annually over the past two years. The stock trades at 1 times forward price-to-book, but the firm sees better opportunities elsewhere, recommending a safe industrials business instead.

Hedge fund manager Lee Robinson, who scored a 900% gain during the 2008 financial crisis, is now shorting insurers including Lincoln National, MetLife, and Berkshire Hathaway using credit default swaps, betting that their growing exposure to the $1.8 trillion private credit market will lead to writedowns. Robinson’s firm Altana is launching a new fund to protect against what he sees as an inevitable downturn in private credit, a cooling of AI hype, and declining liquidity. Net notional bets on US insurers’ CDS have risen to $5.5 billion by May 22 from under $4.9 billion at the end of last year, with trading volumes increasing and the cost of default protection starting to rise. A Moody’s analysis showed that a fifth of US life insurers’ $4 trillion of fixed-income holdings were in illiquid assets, mostly private credit, at the end of 2025, up from 18% a year earlier. Robinson says the current low volatility and tight credit spreads remind him of the calm before the subprime crisis, warning that even one stressed insurer could cause industry-wide ripples.