All figures as of August 2026. I own Brookfield Corporation (BN). This is analysis, not personalized advice. This article was created with the assistance of AI using a transcript from the Youtube video below.
Brookfield might be the most confusing company in Canada. It owns pipelines, toll roads, data centres, hydro dams, an insurance giant, private credit, private equity, and over a trillion dollars of other people’s money. And you can buy it under six different ticker symbols: BN, BAM, BIP, BEP, BBU and BNT.
I own it, and I’ll be honest: I didn’t fully understand the structure for years. Anyone who tells you they know Brookfield inside and out is lying to you, and that confusion is exactly why some of these stocks trade at a discount to what the pieces are worth.
So in this article I’m going to do two things. First, explain how the family actually fits together, in plain English. Second, rank every Brookfield stock from best buy to worst buy, the same S tier to D tier format I used in the video.
How the Brookfield family actually works
Picture a family tree.
At the top sits Brookfield Corporation, ticker BN. This is the owner. It owns roughly 74% of the asset manager, the entire insurance arm, real estate, and big stakes in every company below it. If you buy one ticker and want all of it, this is the one.
One step down is Brookfield Asset Management, ticker BAM. This is the tollbooth. BAM doesn’t own the power plants or the pipelines. It manages money for pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and insurers, over US$1 trillion in total, and collects a fee of roughly 1 to 1.3% a year on the US$672 billion of that capital that pays fees. It owns almost nothing, carries almost no debt, and pays out most of what it earns.
Below that are the three buckets of actual assets:
- Brookfield Infrastructure (BIP): pipelines, ports, toll roads, utilities, cell towers and data centres
- Brookfield Renewable (BEP): hydro dams, wind, solar and batteries
- Brookfield Business (BBU): private equity, whole operating companies bought to be improved and sold
And off to the side is Brookfield Wealth Solutions (BNT), the insurance arm. Every BNT share is exchangeable one for one into a BN share and pays the identical dividend, so owning BNT is essentially owning BN in a different wrapper. It’s being folded into BN entirely, which brings me to the housekeeping.
Six tickers are becoming four
For years the single most confusing thing about Brookfield was the twin tickers: BIP.UN versus BIPC, BEP.UN versus BEPC, BBU.UN versus BBUC. Same companies, same dividends, but the .UN versions are limited partnerships.
Brookfield is deleting the whole problem. The partnership units are being merged into the corporations, and Wealth Solutions is folding into BN one for one. Bruce Flatt’s own logic: in an index-fund world, simpler structures and larger market caps win. By the end of 2026, this gets much cleaner.
Four numbers that matter more than P/E
One warning before the rankings: do not value most of these on price-to-earnings. BN, BIP, BEP and BBU all print absurd or negative P/E ratios because of non-cash depreciation and lumpy accounting. The numbers that actually matter:
- FFO (funds from operations): net income with depreciation added back and asset-sale gains stripped out. The scorecard for BIP and BEP.
- Distributable earnings: the real, repeatable cash after the accounting noise. The scorecard for BN and BAM.
- Carried interest: Brookfield’s performance bonus, typically a 15 to 20% cut of profits when a fund sells an investment at a gain. Lumpy but big.
- Non-recourse debt: each pipeline or power plant borrows on its own. If one asset gets in trouble, the lender can only take that asset, not the parent. It’s why the scary-looking consolidated debt numbers are less scary than they appear.
Now, the rankings, worst to first.
D tier: Brookfield Business (BBU): the value trap
On paper, BBU is the best bargain on the board. Management says the businesses it owns are worth roughly double the share price, and it’s buying back stock hard, over US$300 million of it, to prove the point.
What does it own? Whole companies. The crown jewel is Clarios, the world’s biggest maker of car batteries, in roughly one out of every three vehicles on Earth. There’s also CDK Global (the software car dealerships run on), DexKo (trailer axles), Sagen (Canada’s largest private mortgage default insurer) and Modulaire (modular buildings across Europe).
So why last place? Three reasons.
It pays you almost nothing. The yield is about 0.7%. The entire return depends on selling companies for gains someday.
You can’t see inside it. Private equity is not marked to market. Apple trades millions of shares a day and you know its price to the cent every second. A car battery company with maybe ten possible buyers on the continent is worth whatever Brookfield’s model says it’s worth. They’re not lying to you, but you’re taking their word for it.
The discount never closes. That 50% discount to net asset value has been the story for years, and the gap has stubbornly refused to close. You can be completely right on the value and still make no money. Cheap and stuck is not the same as cheap and about to pay off.
The Clarios IPO, repeatedly delayed, is the catalyst that could change this. Until then, this is a small, aggressive satellite position at best, and I choose not to own it.
C tier: Brookfield Renewable (BEP): the AI power play
I covered Brookfield Renewable in my Canadian utility stock ranking, and the story has only gotten bigger. This is the largest renewable platform on the planet: about 48.7 GW across 25 countries, and the mix is roughly 44% hydro, 22% wind, 15% solar, 11% storage and 8% sustainable solutions (which includes the Westinghouse nuclear stake it co-owns with Cameco).
Hydro is the crown jewel. A dam with a reservoir behind it is basically a giant battery that runs on demand, day or night, which is exactly what AI data centres need. That’s why the biggest tech companies on Earth sign directly with Brookfield: a Microsoft framework for 10.5+ GW, the biggest corporate clean-power deal ever signed, and a Google hydro deal for up to 3 GW. About 90% of generation is contracted, on roughly 12-year average terms, and about 70% of it is inflation-linked.
You get paid about 4.5% to own it, with a distribution that has grown every year for more than a decade.
Why only C tier? Because it’s the most rate-sensitive stock in the entire family. It carries the highest leverage (net debt around 5.7 times EBITDA), and when rates spiked in 2022 the stock got cut roughly in half. The mega-deals also pay off slowly, with the power building out through 2030, while cash goes out the door today. Great business, bumpy stock.
B tier: Brookfield Infrastructure (BIP): the income machine
This is the one I’d hand to an income investor. Brookfield Infrastructure owns the boring, essential plumbing of the global economy: toll roads, rail, ports, regulated utility lines, natural gas pipelines, cell towers and, increasingly, data centres.
The cash is about as predictable as it gets. Roughly 90% of cash flow is either contracted long-term or set by regulators, and about 75% of it rises automatically with inflation. The result is a 4.7% yield with 17 consecutive years of distribution increases, the longest streak in the family, growing 5 to 9% a year on a 66% payout ratio and a BBB+ balance sheet.
And there’s a real growth engine hiding inside the boring: the data segment grew FFO 36% year over year last quarter, and BIP IPO’d its US data-centre business for about US$1.2 billion while keeping 64% of it. Sell a slice at a rich price, keep control. Textbook Brookfield.
The knock: it’s slower-growing than the two above it, and like everything in this family, it’s rate-sensitive. But if you want to get paid well and sleep at night, this is the Brookfield for you.
A tier: Brookfield Asset Management (BAM): the fee machine
BAM is the pure play on fees. It was spun out of the parent in December 2022 (confusingly, under the old BAM ticker the parent used to trade under), and it’s the high-yield way to own Brookfield: a 3.9% dividend that was just raised 15%, with 15%+ annual growth guided, paid from an asset-light business with net cash and an A- credit rating.
The numbers are staggering. US$672 billion of fee-bearing capital, up 19% in a year. A record US$77 billion raised in a single quarter, with another US$149 billion committed and waiting to switch on fees. A target of roughly doubling fee-bearing capital to US$1.1 to 1.2 trillion by 2030. And a captive customer: Brookfield’s own insurance arm hands BAM more than US$190 billion to manage.
So why isn’t the best-run business in the family my number one? One word: valuation. At roughly 30 times earnings, BAM is priced to perfection. Fundraising is cyclical, carried interest is lumpy, and any stumble compresses that multiple fast. If it were meaningfully cheaper, it would be S tier all day. It’s the pick if you specifically want income today, but there’s a better deal one rung up.
S tier: Brookfield Corporation (BN): the whole empire at a discount
Here’s the thing most people miss: BN already owns about 74% of BAM. Plus the insurance arm. Plus the real estate. Plus the big stakes in BIP, BEP and BBU. Plus the carried interest. When you buy the parent, you get four income streams in one ticker: the share of BAM’s fees, the insurance spread, the carried interest, and the cash flowing up from the assets.
The insurance engine alone deserves a paragraph. Wealth Solutions collects premiums and holds customer money for years before paying out. It invests those assets through Brookfield’s platform at a 5.23% net yield against a 3.29% cost of funds. Across US$167 billion of invested insurance assets, that 1.94% spread is a major earnings driver, the same basic engine as Berkshire Hathaway and Fairfax, pointed at infrastructure and private credit. It’s why people call Bruce Flatt Canada’s Warren Buffett.
And the price: BN trades around US$43 while management’s own plan value is about US$68 per share, a target they’ve grown roughly 16% a year and expect to push toward US$140 by 2030. That means you’re buying roughly $1 of assets for 65 cents, with US$210 billion of deployable capital across the group waiting for opportunities.
Take the plan value with a grain of salt; it’s management’s own math, and conglomerates always trade at a discount. The bear case is real too: you have to trust management, the structure is genuinely complex, and real estate plus rate sensitivity have hurt results in stretches. But a tiny 0.7% dividend aside, this is the compounding machine. It’s the Brookfield I own, and the one I’d put new money into today.
The bottom line
| Tier | Stock | One line |
|---|---|---|
| S | Brookfield Corporation (BN) | The whole empire at ~65 cents on the dollar |
| A | Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) | Best-run fee machine, priced to perfection |
| B | Brookfield Infrastructure (BIP) | 4.7% yield, 17 straight raises, the income pick |
| C | Brookfield Renewable (BEP) | The AI power story, held back by rates |
| D | Brookfield Business (BBU) | Cheap on paper for years, hard to see inside |
There’s no E tier this time, and that’s the point. Even the worst Brookfield stock is a real, cash-generating business. This isn’t good versus bad; it’s which one deserves your next dollar.
Quick answers to the questions I get most:
BN or BAM? BN, unless you specifically need the 3.9% income today. You get most of BAM anyway by owning BN, plus everything else, at a discount instead of 30 times earnings.
BIP.UN or BIPC? It won’t matter much longer; the units are merging into the corporations. Until then, the corporation versions (no .UN) mean normal tax slips and fewer headaches in registered accounts.
Is the NAV discount real? Probably directionally right, probably not as generous as management’s exact number. I lean toward them being more right than wrong on BN, and I’m much more skeptical on BBU, where nothing is marked to market.
