Bank Stocks Down | WGA Bank Top 100 Index: Q2 2025
- May 4
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 9
May 5, 2025 | Premium Service | The new edition of “Inflated: Money, Debt and the American Dream,” is being released on Tuesday of this week. The second edition features a lot of original content throughout the book and a new introduction by David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors.
The material on Henry Ford and his role in precipitating the Banking Crisis of 1933 in the first edition of "Inflated" is now published at greater length in “Ford Men: From Inspiration to Enterprise.” We appreciate all of the pre-orders and positive feedback from reviewers.
Below for subscribers to our Premium Service, we provide a detailed analysis for the results for rebalancing the WGA Bank Top 100 Index. In the Index for Q2 2025, we have dropped Discover Financial (DFS) and Heartland Financial (HTLF), which was acquired by UMB Financial (UMB) in January. The acquisition of DFS by CapitalOne Financial (COF) is scheduled to close later this month.
The acquisition of DFS by CapitalOne is a sad event. Discover Financial was one of the top performing banks in the US for many years, but part of that stellar performance may have come because CapitalOne was renting access to the payments rails of the smaller bank. We wrote about the logic of the DFS + COF transaction in a previous issue of The Institutional Risk Analyst (“Elizabeth Warren Opposed CapitalOne + Discover? Really?”).
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