It is hard to get excited after looking at Selective Insurance Group's (NASDAQ:SIGI) recent performance, when its stock has declined 12% over the past three months. However, a closer look at its sound financials might cause you to think again. Given that fundamentals usually drive long-term market outcomes, the company is worth looking at. Specifically, we decided to study Selective Insurance Group's ROE in this article.

Return on equity or ROE is an important factor to be considered by a shareholder because it tells them how effectively their capital is being reinvested. Simply put, it is used to assess the profitability of a company in relation to its equity capital.

View our latest analysis for Selective Insurance Group

ROE can be calculated by using the formula:

Return on Equity = Net Profit (from continuing operations) ÷ Shareholders' Equity

So, based on the above formula, the ROE for Selective Insurance Group is:

12% = US$355m ÷ US$3.0b (Based on the trailing twelve months to March 2024).

The 'return' is the profit over the last twelve months. One way to conceptualize this is that for each $1 of shareholders' capital it has, the company made $0.12 in profit.

We have already established that ROE serves as an efficient profit-generating gauge for a company's future earnings. Depending on how much of these profits the company reinvests or "retains", and how effectively it does so, we are then able to assess a company's earnings growth potential. Assuming everything else remains unchanged, the higher the ROE and profit retention, the higher the growth rate of a company compared to companies that don't necessarily bear these characteristics.

At first glance, Selective Insurance Group seems to have a decent ROE. Even when compared to the industry average of 13% the company's ROE looks quite decent. Consequently, this likely laid the ground for the decent growth of 6.2% seen over the past five years by Selective Insurance Group.

As a next step, we compared Selective Insurance Group's net income growth with the industry and were disappointed to see that the company's growth is lower than the industry average growth of 7.9% in the same period.

Earnings growth is a huge factor in stock valuation. It's important for an investor to know whether the market has priced in the company's expected earnings growth (or decline). By doing so, they will have an idea if the stock is headed into clear blue waters or if swampy waters await. What is SIGI worth today? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether SIGI is currently mispriced by the market.

In Selective Insurance Group's case, its respectable earnings growth can probably be explained by its low three-year median payout ratio of 23% (or a retention ratio of 77%), which suggests that the company is investing most of its profits to grow its business.

Additionally, Selective Insurance Group has paid dividends over a period of at least ten years which means that the company is pretty serious about sharing its profits with shareholders.

In total, we are pretty happy with Selective Insurance Group's performance. In particular, it's great to see that the company is investing heavily into its business and along with a high rate of return, that has resulted in a respectable growth in its earnings. Having said that, looking at the current analyst estimates, we found that the company's earnings are expected to gain momentum. To know more about the company's future earnings growth forecasts take a look at this free report on analyst forecasts for the company to find out more.