Assured Guaranty (NYSE:AGO) Issues Earnings Results, Beats Estimates By $0.55 EPS

Assured Guaranty (NYSE:AGO) released its quarterly earnings data on Tuesday. The financial services provider reported $1.96 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $1.41 by $0.55, Briefing.com reports. The firm had revenue of $245.00 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $194.78 million. Assured Guaranty had a net margin of 53.82% and a return on equity of 11.82%. The company’s revenue for the quarter was down 13.4% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter in the prior year, the business earned $1.12 EPS.

Assured Guaranty Price Performance

Shares of Assured Guaranty stock opened at $82.08 on Thursday. The stock has a market capitalization of $4.55 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 6.62 and a beta of 1.14. The firm’s 50-day moving average price is $84.47 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $77.54. The company has a current ratio of 0.88, a quick ratio of 0.88 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.29. Assured Guaranty has a 1-year low of $49.84 and a 1-year high of $96.60.

Assured Guaranty Increases Dividend

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Wednesday, May 29th. Investors of record on Wednesday, May 15th will be given a dividend of $0.31 per share. The ex-dividend date is Tuesday, May 14th. This represents a $1.24 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 1.51%. This is a boost from Assured Guaranty’s previous quarterly dividend of $0.28. Assured Guaranty’s dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 10.00%.

Insider Buying and Selling

In other Assured Guaranty news, CEO Dominic Frederico sold 55,000 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction dated Wednesday, March 20th. The shares were sold at an average price of $92.43, for a total value of $5,083,650.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief executive officer now directly owns 1,450,824 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $134,099,662.32. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available at this hyperlink. 5.10% of the stock is owned by corporate insiders.

Analysts Set New Price Targets

A number of brokerages recently weighed in on AGO. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods reissued a “market perform” rating and issued a $92.00 price objective (up from $75.00) on shares of Assured Guaranty in a research note on Monday, April 1st. UBS Group lifted their price target on shares of Assured Guaranty from $64.00 to $102.00 and gave the company a “neutral” rating in a research report on Friday, March 1st.

Assured Guaranty Company Profile

Assured Guaranty Ltd., together with its subsidiaries, provides credit protection products to public finance, infrastructure, and structured finance markets in the United States and internationally. It operates through two segments: Insurance and Asset Management. The company offers financial guaranty insurance that protects holders of debt instruments and other monetary obligations from defaults in scheduled payments.