Insights
Time to move to the “Coastal”? Coastal Financial (CCB) is different.
Coastal Financial is a bank that has found a way to get pricing power.
Does a community bank want to sell? Use this proxy season to learn the secrets.
Learning the secrets to bank mergers from proxy reports.
Nice rally banks got there…shame if something were to happen to it.
Does the bank rally stall? Reading Warren Buffet's letter this past weekend, bank investors might wonder why Berkshire's investment heads dumped so many banks near the bottom. After all, banks are not far behind airlines and wildcatters in line to benefit from...
Financials outperforming tech? Yes it can continue.
The friendly folks at Goldman recently ran a regression of which sectors do well with rising rates. If you can't read the chart below, rising rates are bad for stocks in the consumer, utilities, and software sectors, while they tend to support energy and financial...
Tools for Financials Investors Nervous About Inflation and Rates
We'll skip the Charlie Munder quotes; it's broadly apparent that we live in different times: US Debt: Inflation is the Only Way to Manage It (Treasury Dept) Nervousness is rational: Normally we don't see policymakers launch gargantuan, two-pronged stimulus 6 months...
A Tool for Outperformance: Finding Great Businesses Hidden Inside “Boring” Banks
Improve portfolio growth by avoiding the "clones" Owning typical banks can be a losers game. Most banks compete on price, fight low rates, and miss out on innovations like digital currencies. For these reasons among others, regional banks have lagged the broader...
Now the fun begins! Bank merger investing in 2021…
We lost a lot in 2020, but we are getting a lot of it back in 2021. One bit of good news apparent in fourth quarter earnings calls is the coming return of the bank merger and merger premium. Connecting the dots to create a portfolio of likely acquisitions should be a...
The worst large bank in America? (a constructive 3 minute exercise)
Many years ago I attended a dinner with a group of bank investors, including a good friend later profiled in the movie The Big Short. The topic of Fifth Third came up. Fifth Third had recently sold its payments business to scrounge up capital and my friend blurted out...
2021 – The year small banks finally create happy customers, and make more money in the process
2021 is going to be less awful in more ways than you expect. It will be the year banks finally begin to figure out how to make customers' online experience good, while saving money in the process. The issue is as simple as converting to the cloud. You've probably done...
A Technique to Help Little Guys Win in the Markets
Invest like Jedi Despite headlines to the contrary, small taking share from big is a theme we will see plenty of in 2021, from ecommerce (Shopify) to challenger banks (Chime) to payment systems (Square). We may even see some of it in investment management. After a...