As a followup to my previous article where we discovered that at least in 2024 the naive strategy of buying banks based solely on price to book ratio did not perform as advertised. However, the Value Line from which I drew my sample also treats Midwestern banks as a separate category of bank, for reasons […]
A wise financier whose name escapes me once wrote that the trouble with banks is that they have assets that are impossible to value, and the trouble with insurance companies is that they have assets and liabilities that are impossible to value. Given the current situation with insurance companies and natural disasters, this is a […]
Banks are sometimes difficult to get a handle on; the Citigroup 10-K for fiscal year 2007 was over 200 pages long and you could have read every word of it and not found a line reading “Oh, by the way, we’re doomed.” But not every bank is a too-big-to-fail megabank that dabbles in derivatives; the […]
Investment Technology Group (ITG) is in an interesting situation; the company primarily operates a trading platform and provides brokerage services, as well as providing investment research. As you may know, trading volumes have been low for the last few years, never having reclaimed the peak levels of 2008. This has naturally affected ITG’s earnings and […]
According to the news, the FDIC’s insurance fund is in danger of being totally drained. The article’s author speaks of several strategies that can be used to shore it up, which is borrowing money from banks, from the government, or by levying a special fee on banks. The article portrays all of these as risky […]