Lincoln National Corporation

Lincoln National Corporation announced it has entered into an underwriting agreement with major investment banks to issue $500 million in debt, with proceeds intended for corporate purposes and potential buyback of preferred shares. The news sent shares down 5% on June 24, adding to a year-to-date decline of 11.7%, though the stock remains up 16.6% over the past year. Earlier in the year, UBS raised its price target to $39 from $37 with a Neutral rating, while Morgan Stanley cut its target to $40 from $43 with an Overweight rating, both following the company's first-quarter earnings.

The life insurance industry reported a slower first quarter, with the 12 stocks tracked by StockStory beating revenue consensus by 3.1% on average. Lincoln Financial Group posted revenues of $4.87 billion, up 3.9% year-on-year but 1% below analyst expectations, alongside a narrow EPS beat and a significant miss on book value per share. Primerica was the quarter's best performer with revenues of $872.3 million, up 8.6% and 1.9% above estimates, while Brighthouse Financial was the weakest, with revenues of $2.10 billion down 2.7% and missing by 4.8%. Equitable Holdings reported revenues of $3.61 billion, down 4.5% and missing by 7.3%, the largest miss among peers, and MetLife posted revenues of $19.68 billion, up 4.5% and beating by 1.4%. Share prices across the group have been resilient, rising 6.3% on average since the latest earnings results.

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.