Can BAC Double Two Years in a Row?

Bank of America was up 108% last year to lead all members of the Dow.  Amazingly, one can argue that even after the 100% return, BAC is still cheap though.  The stock trades at a little over 0.5x book value, which is a steep discount to its peers.  Although fundamentals say that a double is not an absurd idea, would a back to back doubling have precedent?

At least in the last 13 years, the follow up performance of the previous year's best Dow stock (the "Champ" of the Dow) has not been good.  Since 1999 the defending Champ has been negative 10 out of 13 times in the following year.  Six of those times the Champ has been down by double digits and the average performance is -9.58%.  Below is the performance of the past Champs in the year that they won the title and the year they tried to defend it.  BAC shareholders beware.

2011 Dogs of The Dow Performance in 2012

With the year winding down and Bank of America up nearly 100% for the year on today's move, I thought it might be a good time to revisit how all of last year's Dogs of the Dow have done in 2012.  Thanks to Bank of America's huge gain the 10 worst performing stocks of 2011 have averaged a 10.5% return in 2012, 2.2% better than the rest of the Dow.  However, if you strip out BAC's gain the performance is less than stellar.  On average the other 9 stocks have returned only 1.3% this year.

Q3 Bank Earnings Preview

JPM will kick off earnings season for financials tomorrow, and the whispers seem to be that the quarter is going to be pretty good.  Hopefully JPM will show signs that the banking system is continuing to heal and that profitability is returning.  Whereas a couple of years ago investors would have had a laser like focus on capital and asset quality metrics, this quarter the metrics that I'll be paying close attention to are (among others): Return on Equity, Loan Growth and NIM.  Below are charts of how these have trended for the banking system over the last decade.

While asset quality has gotten a lot better for the aggregate portfolios and charge offs have slowed to pre-recession levels, banks are still holding a lot of non-accrual assets in their residential books.  It will be important to see if the system is taking the opportunity provided by improving housing prices to finally clean their books completely.  This will have major implications for future lending.

What Percent of Bank Holding Company Assets are Held at Commercial Bank Subsidiaries?

The New York Fed is putting together a new banking industry report which can be found here.  It's not as comprehensive as the one that the FDIC puts together on a quarterly basis, but it is valuable in that it goes beyond just the commercial bank subsidiary and looks at the whole bank holding company.  As the following chart shows, less than 80% of assets consolidated on an average Hold Co's balance sheet are held in the commercial bank.  Some other interesting data on BHCs is also below including geographic exposure of systemic assets (i.e. to Europe).