By Carlos Pallordet

Nov 24 - (The Insurer) - The North American insurance composite compiled by Stonybrook Capital and Weild & Co fell 0.6% last week as Wall Street faced a broad sell-off.

The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average both declined by 1.9%.

Meanwhile, the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 fell 3.1% and the small-cap Russell 2000 ended the week 0.8% lower.

Stonybrook-Weild said it was a highly volatile week for markets, with major indexes selling off sharply before clawing back some ground by Friday.

“Concerns over the sustainability of Nvidia’s extraordinary run, combined with murky economic data stemming from the government shutdown, weighed heavily on sentiment,” they explained.

The investment banks highlighted the positive results for chipmaker Nvidia, which reported $57 billion of revenue in Q3, up 62% year on year, with guidance pointing to $65 billion in the next quarter. Despite this, the stock ended the week down 5.9%.

The banks highlighted the extraordinary concentration of market capitalisation at the top of the market, noting that “the Magnificent 7 now represent roughly 30–31% of the entire U.S. equity market, or about $21 trillion in aggregate capitalisation, an unprecedented level of megacap dominance”.

In the North American insurance composite, decliners led advancers by 65 to 49, with nine of the 12 groups retreating in the week.

The two best-performing groups were title insurers and standard commercial insurers, both up 1.3%.

Among the latter, Old Republic recorded the largest gain, adding 3.3% after advancing 7.5% the previous week.

Leader Travelers rose 1.0% after surging 2.7% the week before.

Shares in The Hartford – the second-largest company in the cohort by market capitalisation – increased by 1.9%, compounding gains of 3.4% the previous week.

In contrast, the group of reinsurers fell by 2.5% on average.

Shares in leader Everest Group declined by 4.6%, followed by Conduit Holdings, which was down 2.9%.

RenaissanceRe ended the week 2.4% lower after trading down 2.2% the previous week.

Only SiriusPoint managed to finish in positive territory, eking out a weekly gain of 0.3%.

The group of personal lines insurers added 0.4% while specialty commercial insurers slid by 0.3%.

Meanwhile, shares in global brokers fell by 1.6% on average.

All four constituents finished in negative territory, led by Arthur J Gallagher with a loss of 2.7%.

WTW fell 2.2% while Marsh McLennan and Aon both slid by 1.0%

The two worst-performing groups in the composite were micro cap insurers, down 6.1%, and coastal insurers, down 5.7%.

The Stonybrook-Weild North American Insurance composite is up 5.5% on a year-to-date basis.

In this article, we have included a selection of industry comp tables published in full by Stonybrook and Weild & Co in their weekly update.