Last week this screen earned its keep by removing things. Rank the companies the board has valued by how far the market price sits below a valuation that gives no credit of any kind for future growth, take the widest gaps, then ask two questions: is revenue larger than three years ago, is earnings per share larger than a year ago. Eleven of thirteen were out.
Run the same two lines on 30 August 2026 and thirteen of the twenty widest discounts fail. Seven survive. Four of those are real estate trusts, where a no-growth model built on reported earnings is arguing with depreciation rather than with the business, and one each fails on flat revenue and flat earnings. One name is left: The Cigna Group.
And it is the most interesting survivor this screen has produced, because it exposes the screen's own blind spot.
The arithmetic
A pipeline run dated 30 August 2026 put the no-growth valuation at $493.94 a share, with the upper end of the range at $811.97. The market closed at $278.88 on Friday 28 August 2026.
The market therefore pays 43.5% less than a valuation that assumes the company never grows again — equivalently, the gap to that number is +77.1%. The board returned BUY at a confidence of 58 out of 100, and returned the same verdict a week earlier at $489.98. This is not a number that moves around.
At that close, on the most recent filed accounts:
- 12.6 times the last full year's earnings per share
- $98.7 billion enterprise value against $9.19 billion of EBIT — 10.7 times
- On the screener's own basis, enterprise value against the median operating profit of up to fifteen fiscal years, 12.9 times
The screen passed it. Both passes are misleading.
This is the part worth publishing.
Line one: revenue. Cigna's revenue went from $179.36 billion in FY2022 to $273.85 billion in FY2025 — up 52.7%, or 15.1% a year compounded. On the face of it, the most emphatic pass this screen has recorded.
Now look at what that revenue earned. Gross profit went from $22.34 billion to $24.51 billion. Ninety-four and a half billion dollars of additional revenue produced $2.17 billion of additional gross profit. Gross margin fell from 12.46% to 8.95% across the four filed years, without a single year of reprieve: 12.46, 12.37, 10.15, 8.95.
That is what a pharmacy services business looks like when it grows. The revenue is largely pass-through — drug costs booked as turnover — and the screen cannot tell the difference between turnover that carries profit and turnover that carries a prescription bill.
Line two: earnings per share. Up from $12.12 to $22.18, a rise of 83%. Also the most emphatic pass on the list. Also not what it looks like: the four filed years run $21.30, $17.39, $12.12, $22.18. FY2024 was a collapse, and the 83% is a rebound off it. Measured over the same three years as line one, earnings per share is up 4.1% — and net income is down 11.1%, from $6.70 billion to $5.96 billion.
Earnings per share rose while net income fell because the share count fell: 313.1 million to 268.6 million, down 14.2% in three years.
So a screen designed to remove value traps passed this company twice, and both times for a reason that does not survive contact with the accounts. That is worth knowing about the screen, and it is why the two lines are a filter and not a thesis.
Why the conclusion survives anyway
Strip out the growth that produced nothing and what is left is a business whose profits are approximately flat: gross profit around $24.5 billion, operating profit up 11.8% in three years, free cash flow of $8.39 billion against $7.36 billion three years earlier.
Flat is precisely the assumption this valuation makes. That is the unusual thing here. The frame's standing weakness is that it prices at nothing the companies whose entire value is growth — it is why it says Reddit is worth $2.79. Cigna is the opposite case: a company the frame can value honestly, because the frame's central assumption happens to be true of it.
On that basis the arithmetic is plain. Against a market capitalisation of $74.9 billion, the company generated $8.39 billion of free cash flow last year — an 11.2% free cash flow yield — and returned $5.23 billion of it to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, 7.0% of the market capitalisation in a single year. Return on equity was 14.3%, debt 0.75 times equity.
The case does not require the company to grow. It requires it not to shrink.
The case against
The margin is still falling. The entire argument above rests on "flat", and 12.46 → 12.37 → 10.15 → 8.95 is not flat, it is a slope. If FY2026 continues it, the no-growth valuation is not conservative — it is wrong in the same direction as everything else.
Net margin is 2.2%. On $273.85 billion of revenue, the company keeps $5.96 billion. A 3% adverse move in medical costs it cannot pass on erases more than the whole of last year's profit. That is extreme operating leverage to a variable set by other people's illnesses, and it is what FY2024 was.
The profit is concentrated where the politics are. Gross profit held up while insurance margins compressed because pharmacy services carried it. Pharmacy benefit management is the single most exposed profit pool in American healthcare policy today. The bear case the board returned puts it exactly there: a contraction in premium revenues creates an over-reliance on the pharmacy services segment, heightening execution and regulatory risk.
And the buyback is doing visible work. Earnings per share up 4.1% over three years while net income fell 11.1% is a 14.2% reduction in the share count. That is a real return of capital, not an accounting trick — but it is finite, and it flatters every per-share number in this piece.
What would change the number
Another year of gross margin at 8.9% or below, which would turn "flat" into "declining" and take the valuation with it. A legislated change to pharmacy benefit economics. Or a price in the $490s, where the market and the no-growth arithmetic would agree.
What this measurement does not cover
The board had valued 383 of the 503 priced companies in the index when this ranking was taken, 368 of them with enough filed history to rank — 73% of the index, against 31% a week ago. So the twenty are the widest discounts among the names that have been valued, not a proven claim about all five hundred. No company was valued on the day this ranking was taken; the figures are from runs dated between 15 and 29 August 2026, and Cigna's own from 30 August.
Every figure here comes from accounts filed with the SEC and from a single pipeline run dated 30 August 2026. The price used is the close of Friday 28 August 2026. Nothing in this piece is a recommendation to buy or sell any security.