Cohen & Steers (CNS)

Investment management firm Cohen & Steers (NYSE:CNS) met Wall Streets revenue expectations in Q4 CY2025, with sales up 2.9% year on year to $143.8 million. Its non-GAAP profit of $0.81 per share was in line with analysts’ consensus estimates.

Company Overview

Founded in 1986 as a pioneer in real estate investment trusts (REITs), Cohen & Steers (NYSE:CNS) is an investment manager specializing in real estate securities, infrastructure, real assets, and preferred securities for institutional and individual investors.

Custody banks safeguard financial assets and provide services like settlement, accounting, and regulatory compliance for institutional investors. Growth opportunities stem from increasing global assets under custody, demand for data analytics, and blockchain technology adoption for settlement efficiency. Challenges include fee pressure from large clients, substantial technology investment requirements, and competition from both traditional players and fintech firms entering the space.

Cohen & Steers competes with other specialized asset managers like Brookfield Asset Management (NYSE:BAM), Nuveen (a subsidiary of TIAA), BlackRock (NYSE:BLK), and Invesco (NYSE:IVZ) in the real assets and alternative investment space.

Examining a company’s long-term performance can provide clues about its quality. Any business can put up a good quarter or two, but many enduring ones grow for years. Regrettably, Cohen & Steers’s revenue grew at a tepid 5.4% compounded annual growth rate over the last five years. This was below our standard for the financials sector and is a poor baseline for our analysis.

Long-term growth is the most important, but within financials, a half-decade historical view may miss recent interest rate changes and market returns. Cohen & Steers’s annualized revenue growth of 6.6% over the last two years is above its five-year trend, but we were still disappointed by the results. Note: Quarters not shown were determined to be outliers, impacted by outsized investment gains/losses that are not indicative of the recurring fundamentals of the business.

This quarter, Cohen & Steers grew its revenue by 2.9% year on year, and its $143.8 million of revenue was in line with Wall Street’s estimates.

Revenue growth is one major determinant of business quality, and the efficiency of operations is another. For Custody Bank companies, we look at pre-tax profit rather than the operating margin that defines sectors such as consumer, tech, and industrials.

This is because for financials businesses, interest income and expense should be factored into the definition of profit but taxes - which are largely out of a company's control - should not.

Over the last five years, Cohen & Steers’s pre-tax profit margin has fallen by 15 percentage points, going from 48.3% to 36.8%. However, fixed cost leverage was muted more recently as the company’s pre-tax profit margin was flat on a two-year basis.

In Q4, Cohen & Steers’s pre-tax profit margin was 29.4%. This result was 10.4 percentage points worse than the same quarter last year.

We track the long-term change in earnings per share (EPS) for the same reason as long-term revenue growth. Compared to revenue, however, EPS highlights whether a company’s growth is profitable.

Cohen & Steers’s weak 3.7% annual EPS growth over the last five years aligns with its revenue performance. On the bright side, this tells us its incremental sales were profitable.

Like with revenue, we analyze EPS over a shorter period to see if we are missing a change in the business.

For Cohen & Steers, its two-year annual EPS growth of 4.7% is similar to its five-year trend, implying stable earnings.

In Q4, Cohen & Steers reported adjusted EPS of $0.81, up from $0.78 in the same quarter last year. This print was close to analysts’ estimates. Over the next 12 months, Wall Street expects Cohen & Steers’s full-year EPS of $3.10 to grow 7.3%.

Return on equity, or ROE, tells us how much profit a company generates for each dollar of shareholder equity, a key funding source for banks. Over a long period, banks with high ROE tend to compound shareholder wealth faster through retained earnings, buybacks, and dividends.

Over the last five years, Cohen & Steers has averaged an ROE of 41.5%, exceptional for a company operating in a sector where the average shakes out around 10% and those putting up 25%+ are greatly admired. This is a bright spot for Cohen & Steers.

The debt-to-equity ratio is a widely used measure to assess a company's balance sheet health. A higher ratio means that a business aggressively financed its growth with debt. This can result in higher earnings (if the borrowed funds are invested profitably) but also increases risk.

If debt levels are too high, there could be difficulties in meeting obligations, especially during economic downturns or periods of rising interest rates if the debt has variable-rate payments.

Cohen & Steers has no debt, so leverage is not an issue here.

We struggled to find many positives in these results. Zooming out, we think this was a mixed quarter. The stock remained flat at $68.78 immediately following the results.

Updated: January 22, 2026 at 11:12 PM EST

Before investing in or passing on Cohen & Steers, we urge you to understand the company’s business quality (or lack thereof), valuation, and the latest quarterly results - in that order.

Cohen & Steers isn’t a terrible business, but it doesn’t pass our bar. To begin with, its revenue growth was uninspiring over the last five years. And while Cohen & Steers’s stellar ROE suggests it has been a well-run company historically, its weak EPS growth over the last five years shows it’s failed to produce meaningful profits for shareholders.

Cohen & Steers’s P/E ratio based on the next 12 months is 20.8x. This valuation tells us a lot of optimism is priced in - we think there are better opportunities elsewhere.

Wall Street analysts have a consensus one-year price target of $72.33 on the company (compared to the current share price of $68.78).