$410.00
$860.00
bear $410.00
base $703.00
bull $860.00
margin of safety $330.00
market price* $500.80
Ameriprise is three businesses under one roof. The largest is Advice & Wealth Management, roughly 10,000 financial advisors serving more than 3.5 million US clients, which earns mostly recurring fees on about $1.7 trillion of assets under management, administration and advisement; average fee-based wrap account assets grew 15% in 2025 and management and advice fees rose 14%. The second is Columbia Threadneedle, a global fund manager. The third is RiverSource, a legacy life insurance and annuity book that is being steered away from products with living-benefit guarantees (46% of variable annuity values carried them at the end of 2025, down from 50% a year earlier, with $4.5 billion of net variable annuity outflows in 2025). On the company's own segment figures, wealth management produced roughly 60-65% of pretax operating profit and the other two roughly a fifth each. How we measure earnings. For an insurer and bank holding company, reported operating cash flow is dominated by money that belongs to policyholders and clients: in 2025 operating cash flow was $8.3 billion against net income of $3.6 billion, with $4.6 billion of the difference coming from growth in policyholder account balances and a further swing from derivative collateral. That is not owner cash. We therefore treat net income to common shareholders as owner earnings; stock compensation is already charged in that figure and is not deducted again, and capital spending (about $160-185 million a year) is already covered by depreciation inside it. Earnings per share were $7.81 in 2016, $9.44 in 2017 (after the one-off 2017 tax-reform charge), $14.20 in 2018, $13.92 in 2019, $12.20 in 2020, $28.48 in 2021, $27.70 in 2022, $23.71 in 2023, $33.05 in 2024 and $36.28 in 2025. Results from 2021 onward reflect the 2023 change in long-duration insurance accounting, which restated 2021 and 2022 upward, so years before 2021 are on a different basis and also include the Auto & Home insurance business sold in 2019-2020. We therefore anchor on the five comparable years 2021-2025, whose total-dollar median is 2024's $3.40 billion. That five-year window spans a near-zero-rate year, a bear market (2022) and a weak year driven by insurance charges (2023), so it is not an upswing-only window. Note that much of the per-share growth came from buybacks: diluted shares fell from 168 million in 2016 to 93 million by mid-2026, while total net income grew from $1.3 billion to $3.6 billion. As a financial business whose borrowings, bank deposits and certificate balances are part of its raw material, we value earnings after interest directly and do not subtract debt. The holding company's own long-term debt was $3.1 billion at the end of 2025 against shareholders' equity of $6.5 billion and $1.4 billion of goodwill. Base case: worth about $703 a share. In 2025 owner earnings grew 4.8%; we start year one at about 2%, below that, because 2025 was flattered by strong markets and by favorable insurance assumption updates. Wealth management grows 4% a year for five years, tapering to 2% by year ten and holding there to year twenty, then flat. That growth is credited because it is the output of a process the firm has run for well over a decade, through 2020 and 2022: client net inflows into wrap accounts and recruitment of experienced advisors, funded from its own cash, which drove wrap assets and advice fees up every year. We do not credit market appreciation, margin expansion or new products. Asset management shrinks 2% a year in the first decade and 3% a year after, reflecting the industry-wide drift from actively managed funds to index funds. The RiverSource book declines 1% a year and then 3% a year as variable annuities run off. Nothing beyond these named drivers is assumed; past year twenty the case holds only what the advice franchise demonstrably sustains, with asset management and insurance fading toward zero. Bull case: worth about $860 a share. Starting from the 2025 level of $3.56 billion, advisor productivity and wrap inflows continue at the faster pace of recent years (6% a year for five years, tapering to 2.5%), and the asset management and insurance businesses hold steady for a decade instead of shrinking. Everything rests on levers already working: adjusted revenue per advisor rose 8% in 2025 to $1.12 million. Bear case: worth about $410 a share. A repeat of the 2008-2010 financial crisis is the relevant history. In 2008 Ameriprise's earnings were essentially wiped out by investment losses, guarantee costs on variable annuities and market declines in fee assets, and the company raised new equity late that year. Our bear case has one normal year, then a crisis year in which earnings fall to about 5% of normal, a $500 million reserve charge the following year on the long-term care and variable-annuity books (the type of charge the firm took in 2020 and 2023), several years of reduced earnings as near-zero interest rates collapse the spread earned on roughly $22 billion of bank deposits and the certificate book (about 30% of wealth management profits are rate-sensitive), and a share issue that adds 15% to the share count at trough prices. Earnings recover to only about 92% of today's normal level, with wealth management growing just 2% a year thereafter and the other two businesses shrinking 3-4% a year. Even so, tangible equity of only about $53 a share sits far below this value. We think the franchise is worth more than its capital in a downturn because most of its earnings are advice fees that require little capital and the client relationships, held by advisors with long tenure, proved sticky through 2008-2009 and 2020, when the advice business kept gathering assets. What could make this wrong. First, the earnings level: fee earnings move almost one-for-one with markets, and 2025 included favorable assumption changes, so a sustained 30% market decline would cut earnings sharply even without a crisis. Second, interest rates: cuts to near zero would remove a large slice of bank and brokerage cash income, as happened in 2020-2021. Third, the legacy long-term care book, which produced only $2 million of pretax operating earnings in 2025 versus $58 million the prior year after updating assumptions; adverse assumption changes there are hard to predict and are not fully modeled in any case. Margin-of-safety price: $330. We are fairly confident about the earnings level: five comparable years all fell between $2.6 billion and $3.6 billion, and roughly two-thirds of profit is recurring advice fees. The worst plausible event is a 2008-style crisis combined with near-zero rates and an adverse long-term care or annuity reserve charge; the business survived exactly that combination in 2008-2010, with modest holding-company debt and no single customer or product concentration, although it needed new equity. If we are wrong about market levels, rates and the insurance book at the same time, the shares look worth roughly $400, which is the bear case. At $330 the price represents about $36-37 of normalized earnings per share, an 11% earnings yield, of which the company has consistently paid out 85-90% through dividends and buybacks; at that price buybacks shrink the share count quickly, so per-share value compounds even with modest business growth. Combined with a plausible move toward the bear value within two to three years, that implies about 20% a year without needing the base case to come true, and leaves room for a bad year in markets. The price assumes a three-to-five-year holding period, during which the business pays a growing dividend and makes large buybacks. Previous estimates were prepared on a different basis and are not comparable to these figures.