Created Sep 24, 2026 · Latest reported quarter, ended Jun 30, 2026 (Q2): BAM, BN, POW
BAM BN POW — the last Financials module before Energy. This is the sector's most structurally unusual trio so far: one pure fee-based alternative asset manager (Brookfield Asset Management) and two holding companies (Brookfield Corporation, Power Corporation) that are judged on what they own, not what they report as GAAP net income. Two of the three names are also parent and subsidiary of each other — BN owns roughly 73% of BAM — so this module's first job is teaching you to spot a cross-holding structure before treating two tickers as independent comparables.
| Company | Distinguishing characteristic |
|---|---|
| BAM Brookfield Asset Management | A pure-play, publicly traded alternative asset manager — it earns fees for managing other people's capital, it doesn't primarily own the underlying assets itself. Roughly $1.0–1.2 trillion of total AUM and $672 billion of fee-bearing capital (up 19% YoY as of Q2 2026) across five investment groups: Real Estate, Infrastructure, Renewable Power & Transition, Private Equity, and Credit — Credit is currently the fastest-growing, accounting for over 60% of 2025's capital raised. Spun out of Brookfield Corporation on December 12, 2022, when 25% of the asset-management business was distributed to public shareholders. |
| BN Brookfield Corporation | The parent holding company — runs a Berkshire-style merchant-banking model rather than a single business. Owns roughly 73% of BAM's Class A shares (its Asset Management segment), plus wholly/majority-owned Wealth Solutions (insurance and annuities, run through Brookfield Wealth Solutions, renamed from Brookfield Reinsurance in September 2024, and related entities) and a portfolio of directly-held Operating Businesses (renewable power via Brookfield Renewable, infrastructure via Brookfield Infrastructure, private equity portfolio companies, real estate). BN's own returns are therefore a look-through of BAM's fee-management economics plus its own insurance float and operating-business earnings — not an independent third business. |
| POW Power Corporation | A family-controlled Canadian holding company (the Desmarais family has controlled Power Corp since 1968, via a dual-class share structure) whose value sits almost entirely in two other publicly traded companies: Great-West Lifeco (~70% of shares, ~65% of votes) and IGM Financial (62.2%, held through wholly-owned Power Financial), together over 80% of Power's total value. The remainder is a growing alternative-asset platform, Sagard (private equity and private credit, recently expanded via the Unigestion acquisition), plus a collective stake alongside IGM and Portage Ventures in Wealthsimple, valued at $4.7 billion as of Q2 2026. |
Definitions for every metric below live in the Sector KPI Glossary — Alternative Asset Managers & Holding Companies. Read that first if any term feels rusty; it won't be re-explained here.
| Metric | Q2 2026 | Last twelve months |
|---|---|---|
| Fee-Related Earnings (FRE) | $808M ($0.50/share), +20% YoY | $3.2B, +19% YoY |
| Distributable Earnings (DE) | $707M ($0.44/share), +15% YoY | ~$2.7B (~$1.7/share, approx.) |
| Fee-bearing capital | $672B, +19% YoY | |
| Capital raised (quarter / YTD) | $77B in Q2; $98B YTD (record) | |
| Metric (Q2 2026) | BN | POW |
|---|---|---|
| Distributable Earnings / Adjusted Net Earnings | DE before realizations: $1.4B ($0.61/share), +15% YoY DE incl. realizations: $1.5B ($0.66/share) | Adjusted net earnings driven by GWL contribution $871M (+10% YoY) and IGM contribution $211M (+34% YoY) |
| NAV / Adjusted NAV per share | Not headlined as a single figure the way POW discloses it — approximated externally via sum-of-the-parts | $112.94 (Jun 30, 2026), up from $85.77 (Dec 31, 2025): +31.7% |
| Segment color (Q2 2026) | Asset Mgmt DE $740M · Wealth Solutions DE $480M (+23% YoY) · Operating Businesses DE $361M | Sagard fair value +11% QoQ; Sagard earnings contribution $33M; Wealthsimple stake $4.7B (+15% in the quarter alone) |
BAM's LTM DE-per-share is an approximation built from disclosed quarterly figures (Q1 2026 LTM was $1.69/share; Q2 2026 alone added $0.44/share against a smaller prior-year quarter) rather than a single disclosed LTM number — treat it as directional, not exact, until you re-pull BAM's next 10-K/annual supplemental.
Market data below is a single-source snapshot (stockanalysis.com, Sep 24, 2026) so the three are at least internally consistent; BAM's figures are from its NYSE (USD) listing, BN and POW from their TSX (CAD) listing — each ratio is currency-invariant within its own listing, but don't add the market-cap figures across companies without converting.
| Metric | BAM | BN | POW |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dividend yield (Sep 24, 2026) | 4.51% | 0.75% | 2.87% |
| Trailing P/E | 25.93x | 67.85x † | 23.01x |
| Market cap (approx., native listing) | ~US$71.1B | ~C$115.6B | ~C$58.1B |
| Latest dividend action | Raised 15% with FY2025 results (early 2026) | Raised 17% to $0.07/qtr ($0.28/yr), Feb 2026 — post 3-for-2 split (Oct 2025) | Raised 9%, Mar 2026 (4th Q / FY2025 results) |
† See the valuation-chart caveat below before reading BN's 67.85x as a "expensive" signal — it isn't a usable number for this company. A same-day cross-check: BN's NYSE price of $36.63 against $2.61 of LTM Distributable Earnings per share works out to roughly 14.0x P/DE, a genuinely comparable multiple to BAM's P/E above.
Quarterly trailing P/E, Q3 2021 through Q3 2026, for all three names. Two different series are gap-banded, for two different reasons. BN's GAAP P/E is only meaningful for about five quarters (2021–22, before the 2022 spin-off's consolidation accounting fully took hold) and is excluded for the rest of its history, since post-2022 readings run from 65x to over 1,000x and briefly negative. BAM's pre-2025 P/E is excluded for a different reason: the chart's vendor series itself doesn't reconcile against BAM's own reported earnings for that stretch. Cross-checking BAM's Dec 31, 2024 NYSE close ($54.19) against its reported FY2024 diluted EPS ($1.33, from its Q4 2024 earnings release) gives roughly 41x — not the ~10.5x the vendor's quarterly-ratio series shows for that same date. The post-2025 readings check out the same way: Dec 31, 2025's close ($52.70) against reported FY2025 diluted EPS ($1.52) gives ~34.7x, matching the vendor's 33.99x closely enough to trust. So the chart excludes BAM's entire pre-2025 stretch, where the vendor and the company's own numbers disagree, and plots only Q1 2025 onward, where they agree: 34.38x down to 25.93x — real compression from an already-rich starting point (reported EPS implies ~41x at end-2024), not the ground-up "re-rating" a naive read of the raw vendor series would suggest. POW's P/E series has no such issue and re-rated meaningfully higher through 2025–26.
Source: stockanalysis.com quarterly ratio history, fetched Sep 24, 2026. Gaps and the BAM/BN caveats are explained in the paragraph above. Also published as a standalone page: Manager vs. Holdco Valuation.
Weekly, dividend-reinvested total return from Yahoo Finance adjusted-close history (TSX/CAD listings, fetched Sep 24, 2026), each rebased to 100 at BAM's first trading week (Dec 12, 2022) — the longest window all three names share.
Source: Yahoo Finance weekly adjusted-close history (TSX/CAD listings, fetched Sep 24, 2026) — dividend-reinvested total return. BN completed a 3-for-2 stock split on Oct 9, 2025; the series is split-adjusted throughout. For the full 5-year window (Sep 2021–Sep 2026, before BAM existed), see the ranking table above rather than this chart. Also published as a standalone page: Manager vs. Holdco Total Return.
| Rank | Company | 5-Yr Total Return (Sep 2021–Sep 2026, full window) | Return Since Dec 2022 (shared window, all three) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | POW Power Corporation | +187.6% | +245.4% |
| 2 | BAM Brookfield Asset Mgmt | n/a — not yet listed | +94.3% |
| 3 | BN Brookfield Corporation | +41.2% | +79.7% |
The single clearest example in this curriculum so far of a corporate-structure event, not an operating result, driving a large chunk of a stock's return — and a good test case for separating what's actually settled from what's still an open question.
At spin-off in December 2022, BN retained roughly 75% of the asset-management business's economics through a separate class of BAM ULC shares that weren't publicly traded — only the 25% distributed as BAM's own Class A Shares traded publicly. That structure meant BAM's public market capitalization reflected only a quarter of the underlying business's value — understating its true size against index peers and, per Brookfield's own stated rationale below, working against inclusion in major indices like the S&P 500.
On February 4, 2025, Brookfield Corporation and Brookfield Asset Management completed an arrangement to fix this: BAM issued approximately 1,194,021,145 new Class A Shares to BN, on a one-for-one basis, in exchange for BN's non-public BAM ULC shares. After the exchange, BN held roughly 73% of BAM's Class A Shares — but critically, those shares are now the same publicly listed share class everyone else owns, so BAM's market capitalization now reflects 100% of the asset-management business's value, not 25%. BAM also relocated its head office to New York ahead of the transaction. Management's stated purpose was explicit: BAM President Connor Teskey said the transaction "paves the way for the stock's inclusion in some of the most widely followed U.S. market indices." Per the company's own release, management also believed the change would align BAM's size and structure with its US-based global alternative-asset-management peers.
A genuinely different sensitivity profile from the banks and insurers covered so far — this group's stock prices react less to the rate level itself and more to what rates and capital-markets conditions do to fundraising, asset valuations, and realization activity.
Higher rates raise the discount rate used to value private real assets and infrastructure, pressuring reported (and NAV) valuations for BAM's real estate and infrastructure funds, and can slow fundraising as investors have more attractive public fixed-income alternatives ("denominator effect" competition). But higher rates also widen BN's insurance/Wealth Solutions float earnings (similar to the life-insurer dynamic from Module 0002) and can improve credit-strategy returns, since Brookfield's fast-growing Credit segment directly benefits from higher base lending rates.
The mirror image: lower discount rates support (or lift) private-asset valuations and NAV marks, and cheaper financing typically reopens realization activity — selling mature assets at attractive prices, which is exactly what feeds BN's "distributable earnings including realizations" and BAM's carried-interest recognition. A prolonged low-rate, easy-financing environment is generally the friendliest backdrop for this whole group's reported earnings.
Distinct from the rate cycle on its own: a risk-on, capital-plentiful environment (like the record $98 billion BAM raised in H1 2026) directly grows fee-bearing capital and FRE regardless of which direction rates are moving, while a "risk-off" environment (2022's rate shock, for instance) can freeze fundraising and realizations simultaneously even as rates and valuations eventually stabilize.
Hits this group through several channels at once: mark-to-market losses on BN's direct equity and operating-business holdings, slower institutional fundraising as allocators pull back from new commitments, and delayed realizations as sponsors wait for better exit valuations rather than sell into a weak market — which shows up as depressed "DE including realizations" even if "DE before realizations" (the recurring fee/interest engine) holds up better. POW's NAV is directly exposed to whatever Great-West Lifeco and IGM Financial's own public share prices do in a drawdown, on top of its own operating results.
BAM offers the most capital-light, high-margin exposure to alternative-asset growth — no direct balance-sheet risk from the assets it manages, in exchange for a fee stream that's still sensitive to fundraising cycles. BN and POW both carry direct balance-sheet/NAV exposure to their underlying holdings' performance, for better (POW's five-year record) or worse (BN's structural GAAP-earnings noise obscuring the underlying DE growth).
Since BN already owns ~73% of BAM, holding both isn't full diversification within this sector — it's a leveraged, concentrated bet on the same underlying asset-management business plus BN's additional segments. Worth being explicit with a client about whether they actually want that concentration or believe they're diversifying.
POW's Desmarais family dual-class control (since 1968) and BN's founder-influenced Brookfield governance are both control structures that limit an outside shareholder's influence over capital-allocation decisions — a factor some professionals weigh explicitly against the NAV discount those structures can carry, versus the potential benefit of long-term-oriented, less activist-vulnerable management.
POW re-rated meaningfully higher through 2025–26 on a clean, comparable P/E series, leaving the open question of how much further re-rating room remains versus how much is now priced in. BAM is the opposite of a "re-rated" story once you're reading the correct (post-Feb-2025) basis — its comparable multiple has compressed from the mid-30s to the mid-20s while fundamentals grew, meaning it's cheaper relative to its own recent history even though, at 25.93x, it still isn't the cheapest of the three on an absolute basis today (POW sits at 23.01x). BN's GAAP-obscured valuation means its own re-rating story (on a P/DE basis) is arguably the least "discovered" of the three by a screen that only looks at headline P/E.
Twelve new questions covering business model, the manager/holdco KPI split, dividends, five-year returns, and the BN/BAM restructuring deep dive, plus two review questions from Module 0001 (Big Six Banks) and two from Module 0002 (Life & Property Insurance), interleaved per the due-for-review list in PROGRESS.md.