Loews Corporation (L)

Loews is a family holding company: an insurer, pipelines, hotels and packaging under one roof.

The core asset is a controlling stake in an insurer serving corporate risks; it supplies most of the profit and a dividend stream upward. Alongside sit gas pipelines earning transport fees under long-term contracts, a hotel chain and a plastic packaging maker.

The holding company's logic is not synergy, of which there is none between these businesses, but capital allocation: the family that has run it for decades buys what it considers cheap and has spent years buying back its own shares, which trade below the sum of the parts. Risks: the insurance cycle, pipeline regulation and the possibility that the discount to asset value never closes.