I’ve been writing extensively about the incredible undervaluation of the big banks relative to intrinsic value. Financials in general are by far and away the cheapest and most attractive area of the stock market.  Remember banks have been around for many centuries, and the reason for that is it’s a pretty good business to be...Read More

While banks have been our worst performers year-to-date, it is not because they aren’t performing well from a fundamental basis or improving their financial strength materially. In a stock market that is very expensive and where market participants are taking incredible risks through paying 35-40% higher than historical averages for certain sectors and companies, financials...Read More

July 29th, the Federal Reserve announced the results of the CCAR process including the requested capital return actions for the big banks. Unsurprisingly to those that have been reading this newsletter, the results were very good and we have seen an influx of dramatic dividend increases and stock buybacks. Below I’ll outline a few of...Read More

These last few weeks have been marred by extremely significant volatility as we prepare for the Brexit vote on June 23rd. While most of the impact of any Brexit wouldn’t likely be felt for several years at the minimum, the uncertainty that more countries would leave the Eurozone could mean more volatility for the market...Read More

Investing is when one buys an asset with the expectation of a profit over time, based on fundamental analysis that provides a strong rationale for this expectation. It is also known that publicly traded securities, by definition, fluctuate and can change prices violently based on short-term emotions of market participants. There is a reason why...Read More

It has been an interesting few weeks. While Federal Reserve officials have been hyping up the possibility of raising interest rates in June or July, Friday’s incredibly poor jobs report seems likely to delay any hike until September at the earliest. For many short-term oriented traders, bank stocks have become a trading tool to speculate...Read More

The basic tenets to value investing and margin of safety are the following: Every stock is a fractional share of an actual business. Every business or stock has an “intrinsic value.” The “intrinsic value” of a business generally changes at a much slower rate than the price of a publicly traded stock can change. Over...Read More

I spent my weekend catching up on some of the recently released annual reports of the big banks. The more I read, the less I could explain current share prices, which are down quite a bit on the year. Despite these companies growing in intrinsic value each year over the last 5 years, some of...Read More

It has been quite a bizarre 2016 thus far in the equity markets.  We’ve seen a dramatic selloff and global bear market.  Then we saw a reasonable recovery in March.  Some of the worst performing economies such as Brazil have had the best stock market returns, while many others are still deeply in the red. ...Read More

Below is a fabulous article that was in the Wall Street Journal outlining why banks are extremely attractive investment right now, especially in relation to something like Commercial Real Estate. Much of this is due to the greatly distorted political environment in which the banks are still vilified for the Financial Crisis that ended 7...Read More