Stock Traders Blog

Yesterday I thought the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index wouldn’t have a good reading today. It turned out to be true but the market didn’t drop as much as I expected. I was thinking the DOW would drop over 150 points at some time today and BAC would test the lows of yesterday’s $11.30 when I saw future dropped more then 70 points before market open. I was busy during the day and I set an order to buy BAC but never get executed. Close to the end of the day I took a short position on BAC in hope that a selling attack would happen but it never happened. I noticed that JP Morgan dropped a lot. It is going to release earning next Thursday. I originally though BAC is going to be the first big Bank to release earning on next Friday but JPM is one day ahead of it. And the first big Bink to release earning is actually Goldman Sachs which is on next Tuesday. So there will be a lot of earning to watch next week.

At the end of today I pull in about $30 gains on the BAC trade. No gain is too small to have.

Stock Transactions 2009/07/10

Account Balance 2009/07/10

Account Balance Changes: +$29.71

In my preview post I quoted some Meredith Whitney’s opion. She says she is most comfortable with stock valuations close to tangible book per share levels. So I did a comparison of price and tangible book values for the too-big-to-fail banks and sorted them by the closeness of their price to tangible book value. Citi Group is The closest one followed by FITB and BAC. Is that mean Bank of America is worth to buy? In the group of banks she mentioned Citi group and Bank of America have the lowest price compared to their tangible book values. And she opt out Citi Group as a choice. So seems to me BAC was the one she recommended

Tangible book value and price information is collected from Forbes Public Company Financial Ratios

When I find comments on yahoo stock board compelling I tend to remember them and see if they can prove itself true down the road. Here is one I found

I think Financials just want to stay afloat until the second quarter so they can hide behind their inflated earnings. But they will have to show their hand within the next two to three weeks or so to offer investors some guidance. If that guidance is cloudy, I believe financials will sell off before the 2Q earnings come out in Mid-July onwards.

I expect the 2Q earning statements to be very confusing and investors might take some time to digest them as they try to determine what are true profits and what profits obtained from the mark to market accounting rules. If investors do quickly react to the ‘positive’ news and jump in , financials will go up until investors wake up and notice they have been duped or have misinterpreted the earnings and will sell off.

Point is financials are not going to be truly profitable for a long while. Call me a short if you want but these are facts. Credit defaults are on the rise, foreclosures are on the rise, job losses continues and now interest rates and gas prices are on the rise.

Original is from this thread:
http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_%28A_to_Z%29/Stocks_B/threadview?m=tm&bn=1903&tid=1025357&mid=1025357&tof=-1&rt=2&frt=2&off=1

I tend to believe what it says here as the accounting rule changes really smog the finanical picture of the Banks. As I mentioned before the only indicator that the banks are back to normal is that they start increasing dividend payment. I guess that is still one or two quarters away for the banks that are able to repay TRAP.

I recall one of the small banks that I trade on OZRK. It seem to me a very well managed bank. It recently come down a lot because of a real estate loan went bad. But looks like its resistent is at $20 ~ $21. I want to remind myself that its current price may be a good entry point. But again the volumn on this stock is quite low.