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NEW YORK US banks have been able to raise many billions of dollars in the past few weeks by selling shares to investors, but the jury is still out on whether this is the savviest of 'smart money' — or just plain dumb.
For the past year, banks were hard pressed to squeeze even a dime out of investors amid worries of mounting credit losses, failures and even nationalization.
Fast forward to this year, when US financial services companies sold more than $34 billion of common stock, according to Thomson Reuters data, including $26.2 billion in the 13 days since regulators announced their stress-test results for the largest banks.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup are among more than 30 financial institutions that have tapped equity markets with offerings that were all well oversubscribed. Bank of America Corp, the largest consumer bank and the institution with the biggest stress-test capital shortfall, on Tuesday raised $13.5 billion.
Some investors, though, question why everyone has fallen back in love with the banks when the markets and the economy are still in flux.
'I don't understand it. We are in a deleveraging market and they have declining margins and bloated assets,' said Matt Paschke, portfolio manager at Leuthold Weeden Capital Management, which oversees $3.2 billion in assets. 'It's not an area we are interested in from a risk-reward perspective. There is still risk in this market.' Leuthold is home to the Grizzly Short Fund, which returned 73.69 per cent last year, but it does also take long positions, and some other long-short funds have similar doubts about the prudence of snapping up the bank share offers.
'I think, by and large, the money that's being put now is premature — meaning we have a number of years of pretty serious losses yet to come in the banking sector,' said Whitney Tilson, founder of hedge fund T2 Partners LLC.
Indeed, Tilson warns that the easy money from the bank rally may have already been made.
Some of that was earned by T2 itself, which, for example, sold Wells Fargo & Co on the way down, then bought the stock near the lows and made money on the way up.
'Wells was a dream. We didn't just buy it low, we shorted it at $30 all the way down and then flipped around and then went long it at $10. That is the dream. That almost never happens.' T2 booked some profits in Wells shares recently in the mid 20s. They closed at $24.46 on Wednesday.
So who is buying all these new shares?
'Some of the demand is from hedge funds caught short, using these deals to cover their shorts,' said Mark Fitzgibbon, research head at investment bank Sandler O'Neill and Partners.
'Some of it is institutional money managers who feel like they missed the bottom and are chasing these stocks now.' Several factors — the barrage of federal bank rescue plans and easing worries of failure or government takeovers — combined to lift bank shares off more than 16-year lows on March 6. Since then, the KBW Banks Index has nearly doubled.
'The days of nationalization fears, the days of depositors lining up outside of banks, I think those days are behind us,' said Jason Polun, who analyzes US large-cap bank stocks at Baltimore mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price, which manages more than $269 billion in assets.
Investor appetite for bank stocks is an important barometer for the health of the markets and for the broader economy.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in a '60 Minutes' interview in March said one of the first signs of imminent recovery will be when a big bank raises private capital.
Equally important, analysts and bankers said money managers may not love bank stocks but feel pressure to keep pace with rivals by rebalancing portfolios that had shed financial stocks.
'A number of the large mutual funds were underweight financials because (the stocks) were underperforming, but now that they are performing well again, these funds have to recalibrate the weightings or they will underperform the overall market,' said Joe Castle, Barclays Capital's Americas equities syndicate head.
Sentiment among fund managers around the world has turned bullish since February, when Wall Street's implosion was still fresh and the specter of government takeovers haunted investors. Investor pessimism on bank stocks started to recede in April, according to Banc of America Securities-Merrill Lynch.
The net per centage of respondents underweight banks swung significantly in April to a net 26 per cent from a whopping 48 per cent in March, the Banc of America-Merrill survey found.
'Apocalyptic bearishness of a mere three months ago has been replaced by fairly typical early-cyclical sentiments.' — Reuters
