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by wefarrell 1969 days ago
UNH shareholders would disagree - I've made 10x on it.

Net income is a poor metric here. It includes acquisition costs (and interest paid on debts for said acquisitions).

1 comments

Net income over a long period of time is appropriate in my opinion. They consistently hover around 5% for 15+ years. It’s a pretty competitive market.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-g...

I don’t see a lot of juice to squeeze in insurance companies in general.

They're using their profits to buy their competitors and downstream partners, which in UNH's case has allows their market cap to grow 10x in 10 years.

The 5% that you quote is after those acquisitions (and taxes) and is not a true indicator of profit.