Stockwatch

The week's winners
Jardine Lloyd Thompson 0.8%

The week's losers
St Paul Companies down 15.3%
Wellington down 13.2%

Doom, doom, doom. The crunch came on Tuesday, as insurer after insurer saw their share prices plunge to 52-week lows.

Many broke their dismal records a few days before only to see them smashed again as investors ran screaming from the sector.

James Schiro must rue the day in May when he took over as chief executive at Zurich Financial Services.

Crunching down to yet another 52-week low on Tuesday, Zurich was trading at £7.75. A far cry from last summer, when it was flying at nearly £250. It was among the hardest hit insurance stocks in an industry-wide purge on Monday.

The worst pain on Monday was reserved for European stocks with heavy life operations, as investors digested a profits warning from Aegon and withdrew from the sector after heavy falls on Wall Street on Friday.

This sent values spiralling downwards at AXA, Fortis and Aviva. AXA closed down 10.91% in Paris after hitting a 52-week low.

AXA's problems took a turn for the worse last week when Morgan Stanley downgraded the group, setting a price target of £10, on the back of worries about its capitalisation.

Analyst Rob Procter wrote: "AXA needs capital to restore the ability to grow its franchise and to place it back on a level playing field with its better capitalised European peers. Until it does the stock will continue to suffer."

Fortis, too, plumbed the depths of its recent history also hitting a 52-week low in Amsterdam on Monday after falling 9.76% - only to fall another 6% next day.

Aviva dropped a sudden 13.63% on Tuesday, getting down to a 52-week low of 359.4p, after it announced it was cutting pay-outs to customers of its unitised and with-profits funds by about 5% because of the plunging stock market.

Tuesday provided yet more punishment for the insurance sector as it fell far faster than the FTSE.