The Institutional Risk Analyst

The surprise pre-release of Q4 results led to a significant drop in JPMorgan's stock price and took down the entire sector along with it. But is this the only negative surprise likely to come from JPM? We think not. CNBC’s Jim Cramer said on X yesterday that investors should buy JPM on the dip, but we disagree. In fact, the markets seem to know something about JPM. Maybe this explains why Citigroup (C) has outperformed the House of Morgan all year.

So the $200 billion asset Fifth-Third Bank (FITB) is buying $80 billion asset Comerica Incorporated (CMA)? Is this the start of a wave of similar transactions among regional banks? Hopefully not. This deal neither creates great value nor promises significant synergies, but it does make for a bigger regional bank with so-so financial metrics. Essentially FITB is rescuing CMA shareholders.

Whalen Global Advisors LLC (WGA) has published the latest edition of the WGA Top 50 Banks, the fifty top performing large commercial banks in the US. Drawn from the members of Peer Group 1 and other sources, WGA screens the group based upon five proprietary measures of financial and market performance.

Our Bank Top 10 and Top 25 indices continue to outperform the industry benchmarks, but the broader samples show growing financial stress

Not all banks or companies are the same and not all follow the herd.

The “winners” in the mortgage sector will be those larger players with equally large servicing books that can access bank funding

In the Q3 2021 edition of The IRA Bank Book, we document the slow destruction of US bank asset and equity returns by the FOMC.