Iysam Atwan | Manulife: The Market Punished The Wrong Q1
Biography: “I'm the founder of AT1 Capital, an insurance and asset management platform focused on annuity reinsurance, asset-liability management, and capital structure for life insurance balance sheets. I write about life insurers, reinsurers, and asset managers with insurance balance sheets, and the capital structure plays underneath them. My purpose on Seeking Alpha is to write technical, valuation-focused pieces on insurance and financials from a practitioner's lens rather than a retail-friendly framing.”
Buy | “Manulife Financial Corporation (MFC) is a buy at C$52, with a base case of C$60 to C$70 over the next twelve months and an intrinsic value of C$76 using my residual income model. The stock sold off almost 6% after Q1 2026 earnings on a single line item, namely C$4.4B of net outflows in Global Wealth and Asset Management. My view is that the market overreacted, selling the high-return business because the low-return business had a soft quarter and mispriced the sum of parts. The main leap of faith in the thesis is that the wealth outflow trend doesn't persist into Q2 and Q3, in which case I would step back to neutral.”