As an investor, if you had access to more detailed information other than the GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), wouldn’t you use it? GAAP data provides a uniform set of rules and formats to facilitate analysis by investors and creditors, and in this regard, it has greatly helped provide a level of uniformity to corporate financial reporting.1
But there are multiple sets of reporting books beyond GAAP for many of the companies we look at. These include regulatory filings that are more detailed than the GAAP data that most of the street spends their time analyzing. Today we will touch on what we look at in the insurance industry, and the following two blogs will touch on the banking and consumer industries.
Also, we are in the process of publishing an in-depth report on how we analyze insurance companies, so if this content is of interest to you, make sure to subscribe to our blog to receive this report.
Insurance companies are regulated at the state level, by 50 different state insurance departments. Each company is required to file financial statements in every state in which the insurer writes business. This data is publicly available. Statutory reporting is generally (1) more conservative than GAAP, and (2) includes greater granularity than the information provided within SEC documents. Therefore, statutory data is an excellent source of information for fundamental insurance company analysis.
Detailed/thorough information we can find in statutory data (vs GAAP):
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