Bank Stocks Down 11.56% Yesterday

With the "No Short" rule in place, the 68 stocks in the S&P 1500 Bank group went down an average of 11.56% yesterday.  At the same time, 88% of the stocks in the group did less than their average 30-day volumes yesterday, while nearly 25% did less than half! 

With the shorts now out of the market temporarily, it looks like volume is drying up, buyers have retreated (why buy now when we know the shorts will be back?), and only the sellers are left. 

Below we highlight the 20 worst performing S&P 1500 Bank stocks yesterday.

click to enlarge

Comments

[GKM:]

Don't give us that BS about "why buy when the shorts will be back". No one is buying because there is no known value in these stocks and the weak shorts have been taken out. Having shorts creates buying interest in case you aren't aware. Give us some info about the amount of the short interest in these companies and how much that changed between last week and the week before.

Alternatively, go look at the 1932 witch hunt against the shorts only to have the market continue to meltdown for several months after the fact. Why? Because there were no buyers left and stocks simply hadn't found their level.

2008 Sep 23 10:36 AM

[JasonC:]

The plug protection team bought to squeeze the shorts Thursday and Friday, to goose the settlement price on options as high as possible for Friday expiration. As soon as they were past that, they sold. That is all.

Also, the bailout was believable on Friday, but Monday we got to see what the Dems plan to do with it. And the answer is wreck it thoroughly with insane unworkable class warfare riders. So people basically decided on Monday that the bailout was a sham and either wasn't going to happen or wasn't going to help.

People are still uncertain. But until they see a deal in ink they aren't going to believe this braintrust isn't going to screw the pooch yet again. And if the deal is "oh and you have to give us the bank, and make mortgages credit card loans and never foreclose", and such utter rot, then the government can spend as much as it likes and it won't make the slightest difference. Nobody who isn't already bankrupt will take such terms, so it won't save anything, anyway.

The whole point of the Paulson plan was to get the bad paper *out* of the banking system. Make the terms into "if and only if you've failed and want to be nationalized and turned into arms of HUD", then nobody will sell to them and it won't have the slightest effect.

These people are not fit to run a McDonalds...

2008 Sep 23 01:11 PM

[MSmailbox:]

Yes! Capitulation has finally happened! I'm looking at MI and once I'm sure, that everyone who wants to sell, has sold, I intend to pull the trigger! MI is one of the very few banks, which acted pro-activly to raise capital, long before this became a crisis... She sold a data-processing concern, one which I wanted her to sell, even had there been no capiatal reason for doing so. MI is the parent company of Southwest Bank, in Saint Louis (the one that is often the first to drop (raise) rates, when the fed moves. She's even suspended construction of some new branches, in Saint Louis, until things are stable. She's third on a (blanked-out) list of banks, which are in good shape (two banks are better, but I have no idea what they are). Also, the mortgage bailout has covered her (locally), with respect to the closing of our auto plants, which would have surely caused defaults to occur, in the saint Louis area. I want to verify that the market agrees with me, before I increase my holdings, but accumualtion seems to be in order. A well-deserved reward, for one of the few, "who saw this coming and took the necessary steps."

2008 Sep 24 09:12 AM

[MSmailbox:]

MI has upside resistance at around $30 / share... I intend to start off-loading shares, graually, above $25, just to be cautious. I hope to meet with *****, this afternoon, to get a better fix on this. Right now, we're sitting in deeply oversold territory.

2008 Sep 24 10:24 AM