Equitable Holdings, Inc. (EQH) stock intrinsic value fair value estimate & owner earnings analysis

Equitable Holdings owns Equitable Financial and Equitable America, which sell individual annuities, workplace retirement plans and institutional savings products. It also controls AllianceBernstein, a global asset manager with $866.9 billion under management at the end of 2025, in which it held about a 68% economic interest after buying $761 million of additional AllianceBernstein units in 2025. A third segment, Wealth Management, is the Equitable Advisors brokerage and advisory network, with $122.0 billion of client assets at the end of 2025. The Retirement business is the engine: account values grew from $106.6 billion at the start of 2023 to $174.9 billion at the end of 2025, with positive net inflows of $5.3 billion, $7.1 billion and $5.9 billion in those three years. How we measured earnings. For a life insurer, cash flow from operations mostly reflects policyholder deposits, reinsurance settlements and sales-commission timing, so we built earning power from net income available to common shareholders instead. Stock-based pay is treated as a real cost, and we assumed equipment and software spending roughly matches depreciation. We removed three one-time items: a roughly $1.0 billion tax benefit in 2023 from releasing a valuation allowance, a $499 million loss when legacy variable annuity policies were transferred to Venerable in January 2025, and a $1.1 billion loss on assets handed over when about 75% of the individual life insurance block was reinsured to RGA in July 2025. We used only 2021 to 2025, the years reported under the current insurance accounting rules; earlier years were reported under old rules and are not comparable. On that basis earnings per share were $3.98, $5.46, $0.69, $3.69 and -$0.60, and we took the middle year, about $3.69 per share, as normal earning power. The swings come mostly from the hedges on older variable annuity guarantees, which lose money when stock markets rise (2023 to 2025) and gain when they fall (2022). As a check, the parent company's recurring cash receipts from its subsidiaries, after interest and preferred dividends, work out to roughly $3.30 to $4.10 per share in 2023 and 2024, which is consistent with our figure. Base case ($53.47 per share). We start below normal, at $3.00 per share, for three reasons from the filings: from April 2025, 75% of the in-force individual life insurance block was ceded to RGA, and its profits went with it; the company says the main insurer, Equitable Financial, will not pay a dividend to the parent in 2026; and the first half of 2026 earned only $0.50 per share, including a second-quarter loss. From there, earnings per share grow 5% a year through year 5 and 3% a year through year 10. That growth comes from Retirement inflows continuing at their recent pace and from fewer shares outstanding: diluted shares fell from 421.2 million in 2021 to 298.1 million in 2025. We assume buybacks slow to what recurring cash can pay for. After year 10, earnings stay flat for another 20 years on the strength of the retirement and asset management franchises, then stop. We assume no further growth beyond that. Bear case ($13.17 per share). Earnings stay at about $1.40 per share, a little above the $1.26 average of 2023 to 2025, for ten years, then fade to zero over the following decade. This is what happens if variable annuity hedge losses keep weighing on results the way they did in 2023 to 2025, if AllianceBernstein's outflows continue (net outflows were $11.3 billion in 2025, led by $9.1 billion from retail funds), and if buybacks stop. Leverage makes this worse. The company has $3.86 billion of borrowings, and shareholders' equity was slightly negative at the end of 2025 (-$74 million) once about $6.3 billion of accumulated losses recorded outside net income are counted. These include falls in the market value of bonds. The balance sheet leaves little room for error. Bull case ($99.36 per share). Earnings start at the normal $3.69, then grow 8% a year through year 5 and 6% through year 10. That assumes Retirement inflows hold at the 2024 to 2025 pace, share count keeps falling at close to the 2021 to 2025 rate, and the larger AllianceBernstein stake adds to earnings. The drag from older annuity guarantees also shrinks as that block runs off. The year-10 earnings then continue indefinitely without growth. What could make this wrong. Reported profits here depend heavily on how stock markets and interest rates move the hedging results, so any single year can be far above or below our figures. The company has returned about $7.4 billion to shareholders from 2021 to 2025, well above the $4.7 billion it reported in net income over the same years. Part of that was paid from one-time capital releases, such as the $1.5 billion special dividend from Equitable America after the RGA deal, and that cannot be repeated. We could not fully reconcile reported profits with the much higher cash the company returned, and we give weight only to recurring sources.