Banks & financials — regional revival (new) Bullish ▲

Halftime committee (Jun 25): financials are "the cheapest sector in the market" (some at 1–1.2× book) and regional banks are "the #1 read-through to the real economy" — KRE (regional-bank ETF) and Fifth Third (FITB) at new highs, JPMorgan at an all-time high ($338), loan growth +8% (best in 3 years), and lending shifting back to regional banks as private-credit underwriting standards tighten (the flip side of the private-credit squeeze) plus a deregulation tailwind. Brown's "Holy Trinity" long is Citizens Financial (CFG; sector tailwind + chart breakout + fundamentals, ~10× earnings / 35% growth); Link adds Truist (TFC) at 1× book / 4% yield, ROTCE 12.7%→15–16% by 2027 with a new ex-Fiserv CEO; capital-markets/IPO/wealth tailwinds post-stress-test make the banks "one of the hottest trades in the market." Eisman (Jun 26): the big investment banks are the recession barometer — as recession fears faded they rallied hard in Q2 (Morgan Stanley +34%, Goldman +27%, Citi +27%), financials +9% the sector. Payments are the exception to avoid (Fiserv −14%, PayPal −6%, Coinbase −14%). Clifton (Jul 6, Strategas): the bank-M&A window is open now — merge before the midterm/2028 regime risk closes it; regulators are likely encouraging community-bank consolidation ("it doesn't make sense to have thousands and thousands of community banks"), and the window narrows sharply if a progressive president wins 2028. Deregulation is also the Fed's balance-sheet exit ramp (LCR relief so banks absorb Treasuries). Halftime committee (Jul 13, into Q2 earnings): Link — banks are "a buy" and "always trade crummy around earnings," so make the shopping list: NII +9%, loans +7–8%, deposits +7%, investment banking +26%, M&A fees +9% (global M&A +57% YTD); Citi upgraded financials to overweight (top-2 sector over a month), consensus S&P earnings growth ~24.5% and rising (Evercore 7750 year-end). Her watch: Wells Fargo (doesn't own — NII bottoming this quarter, the asset-cap lift the growth unlock) and Capital One at 7.5× with ~$2.6B of unappreciated Discover synergies; Terranova (added JPM + CBOE) cautions expectations went "low to high in 30 days" in the money-centers, preferring the less-crowded Amex on the strong affluent consumer; final trades ran MS (Sethi, wealth-management catalyst) and BLK (Lebenthal, Q2 asset prices land in earnings). Halftime (Jul 15): near-record buying — the biggest financials inflow since 2020 (BofA flow show) as the group leads the market over the past month; GS/JPM/BAC at record highs on blowout quarters (MS equities trading +69%, net-new money +150% y/y). Terranova: depressed Q2 sentiment/positioning is rebuilding and the move spreads to regionals and the asset managers (BlackRock at the same early-momentum moment; Blackstone "probably seen the worst"); Weiss prefers Goldman as the M&A-cycle lever (the AI-lab IPO pipeline needs the underwriters) with a Warsh steepener tailwind — but notes banks typically fade a week after great prints, so be patient on entries; Sechan added Morgan Stanley (trimmed WFC) for the capital-markets + wealth-management mix; Mayo goes GS 1325 / JPM 375. Smead (Feb-05-26, back-fill): the European-bank leg — Barclays, UniCredit and BAWAG releasing the excess capital the ECB blocked during Covid via buybacks (the test: book-value-per-share growth >10% while cheap); Orcel "a savant," negotiated-deposit markets give European banks fatter spreads than the transparent US/Canada price. US regionals from the Nov-2023 boring-and-meritorious screen (WAL, FITB, MTB at ~1% each) working — Fifth Third buying Comerica wipes an executive team + SG&A, the same scale math as oil M&A. Hay (Jul 26): "the breakout by the regional bank index is very bullish. It looks great" — he opened his stock-market section with KRE to show "I'm just as bullish on certain areas… as I am bearish on others." Many regionals "either have broken out or [are] very close to it… very reasonably priced 10 11 12 times earnings." Entry discipline: extended over the breakout level and the 200-day, so "I like to look at breakouts and then buy them when they pull back after they break out." Financials also rose through the 2000–02 unwind. Aitken (Jul 28), a valuation caution from Canada: underweight the Canadian banks and modestly trimming BMO/TD/RY/BNS for several quarters, "using it at the margin as a source of cash." He sees "a lot of validity" in David Rosenberg's "banks are our AI bubble" thesis. The objection is purely price — forward P/Es at or near all-time highs after a huge sentiment swing: "it's not really a concern about what's in front of the banks fundamentally. It's just what we're paying for it." Prefers non-bank financials (added to Intact Financial on weakness; added TMX Group in Q2). Hay (Jul 31, POW!): a rated Buy / Accumulate on KRE (equal-weighted ~150 US regional/community lenders) — "while the market pays 30x+ for everything that touches AI, this entire sector trades at 11x earnings because it broke three years ago and no one has forgiven it." The 2023 failures were a correctable mistake (long-duration bonds vs flighty uninsured deposits) since substantially addressed, so ~12× forward "embeds a permanent risk premium for a crisis that has already passed." Q1 2026 confirmed the NIM inflection — deposit costs rolling over while loan yields hold — and it is curve-driven, not cut-dependent ("a steeper curve does much of the work"), with Japan's banks (steepest developed-world curve, early-2023 breakout) as the out-of-sample proof. Re-rating engine: ROTCE climbing low-teens → mid-teens against 1.4–1.5× tangible book (vs sub-1× at the 2023 trough, 1.7–2.0× in better times). Catalysts "asymmetric to the upside": a regional M&A/consolidation wave unlocked by clearer approval pathways plus Basel III capital relief — "both firing would do it violently." Against it: the deep-value entry is largely gone (~$76, +25–28% off the lows), money-centers (KBWB) have "crushed the regionals," and ~$875B of CRE debt matures in 2026 where equal-weighting "actually concentrates CRE risk" — "the thesis-breaker to watch." 2026-AUG-10 — Steve Eisman Ep 72 (Schorr/Worthington): a near-perfect big-bank quarter — IB +38%, trading +47%, wealth +7% organic, "huge ROEs on high capital bases… almost as good as it gets"; offsets are spread lending only "okay" with deposit competition lifting cost of funds, trading's historical −17% H2 seasonality, and IB tied to "is your one big AI trade happening." Schorr's rule: disagreement makes trading revenue (Q2 equity revenues +68% on volumes +9–10%, margin balances +50%). Structural debate: lazy-cash economics ($4T in US checking earning zero; the retail brokers' most lucrative line — SCHW/LPL) versus agentic-AI cash optimization — brokers gatekeep the agents, regulators won't tolerate five-basis-point deposit stampedes, and JPM's internal studies find money-managing agents "wrong the majority of the time" (the delegation bar is "like 99.99%"). Eisman's tell: "when everything is humming… it's always possibility that tomorrow that's not going to hum." 2026-AUG-07/11 — CNBC Halftime: financials print a tenth then an eleventh consecutive weekly gain — the longest streak since at least 1989. Brown (Aug 11): "I can't think of an area in financials I don't like other than payments" — credit cards, regional banks, brokers (Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, long CFG), asset managers, money-center banks (JPMorgan at record highs, "Morgan Stanley looks amazing") and insurance. "This is one of the hallmarks of the 2026 bull market — how well almost every financial that matters has been acting, and how great the guidance looks." Belsky swapped Qualcomm into Truist for dividend growth; Davi's ETF-Edge frame (Aug 10): banks are the AI adopters — strong IPO/M&A calendar, cheaper than the market, favorable rate setup (KBWB). 2026-08-17 — leadership is global, not American: "they just continue to carry the football here and it's not just US. Japanese banks, even with yen intervention and JGB yield, continue to lead. European banks have been absolutely exceptional… The brokers have been excellent — Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, but even some of the smaller ones." Credit refuses to confirm the scare: "public credit remains very benign. Double B spreads I think made new cycle lows last week." The policy leg is Dan Clifton's "extreme period of financial deregulation… you can't really shrink the balance sheet of the Fed until you deregulate the banks. And the charts know it and the stocks know it." Trennert's fundamentals: "the curve is going to steepen… the economy is strong, so the credit losses should be pretty minimal." Verrone's own caveat, worth keeping: "I just can't think of too many times in my career… where you're on the verge of a big problem and every bank stock around the world is at new highs. It seems a little out of step." (Trennert/Verrone on Eisman Ep 73, Aug 17) 2026-AUG-19 — Halftime (Liz Thomas / Simpson): The textbook objection gets tested and dismissed: the Treasury's buyback produces a flatter curve, "which classically is bad for financials. However, financials have done so well this entire year with a flattening yield curve that I don't think that matters right now — I think this is even bullish for financials because of everything else that is going well." Tom Lee added JPM to his core stock ideas; Simpson: "best of breed financial services… the awakening of IPOs is not over and this company is 100% deserving of being on his list." 2026-AUG-15 (Mark Newton, Fundstrat, Jimmy Connor): "I'm overweight the financials." Warsh's removal of forward guidance anchors the front end while long yields press up — "banks borrow short, lend long… very helpful for the net interest margins," with 2013's taper tantrum and post-2016 as analogues. Key qualifier: the steepening is partly growth, not only term premium. Sequence — capital markets first (GS, MS), then the lenders (BAC, BK, C) "starting to push higher, breakout." 2026-AUG-26: Rule: US community banking is “cheap. Really cheap” — small franchises at substantial discounts to book earning 10% after tax on book (“a 15% after-tax earnings yield” reinvestable for growth), consolidating “as older owners die and sell their institutions to bigger institutions.” His self-criticism: he should “go back to working in my roots” and allocate more here. No individual bank named. (Rick Rule, David Lin Report 2026-AUG-26) 2026-AUG-23 — Jay Singh (SSR call, 2026-AUG-23): "banks will benefit from higher rates if we don't see this rally get under control." The expression is Citigroup — ~9.5× forward and under 1.2× price to tangible book against Goldman at 14-15× and Morgan Stanley at ~16.5×, "still like a 50% discount… the deepest discount for money center mega banks" — with a $165 price target on Jane Fraser's balance-sheet clean-up and wealth-management build. Entry discipline: "we normally wouldn't be buying this, but if you think that interest rates are going to stay high, banks should benefit… buy it on pullbacks." Steve Eisman (The David Lin Report, 2026-AUG-28) — the strongest safety statement on US banks in this archive, from the person with the most standing to make it: "the banks post Dodd-Frank were forced to delever enormously. The leverage today is like half of what it was. So I don't worry about the banks these days. They may have exposure to private credit, but given how much capital they have, I just don't think it's a systemic issue… the banking system in the United States, I don't think it's ever been this safe in anyone's lifetime." Asked whether that is a lesson learned or a rule obeyed: "probably a combination of the two." He is also shipping a premium how to analyze banks masterclass in mid-September. Separately, the one instrument he names for de-risking is a financials ETF — KBWP, the property & casualty insurance index — "just as one example." 2026-SEP-08 (CNBC Halftime, Belski): October earnings "will be crushed by the financials, they're going to kill it" on a wealth-management cycle that "is not being told" — crowded out of Q2 calls by deal flow — plus "a decent commercial banking cycle." Institutions "are still not fully invested," overweighting the midterms. Expressed in the regional: final trade PNFP. Directly contested the same day by Larry McDonald, who is short the group on record price-to-book plus data-center credit exposure. 2026-SEP-10 — a Canadian counterpoint (JF Tardif, Timelo). The Canadian banks trade "at the most expensive in multi-decades in terms of PE, but also price to book," on earnings whose recent strength came from trading, wealth management and insurance — "and that's cyclical." He rejects the "banks are structurally different now" case on its own terms: in a bear market AUM falls and in a 20% drawdown "trading goes down, volume goes down." With Trump-era access risk unpriced — "you're not paying a discount for that risk. Right now people are paying the highest premium they have ever paid. I just don't like your risk/reward" — his advice in a tax-free account is "a no-brainer. Sell them… and you might be able to buy them cheaper down the road." Timelo is short some, undisclosed. Dissent — Jay Singh (SEP-13) shorts Valley National (VLY) as the Fed-hike hedge: CRE is priced off SOFR, so a hike hits CRE lenders even if the 10-year falls; ~329% non-owner CRE to risk-based capital, 13% fee income, lagging ACL, near five-year highs; target down 20-30% on a rate scare. 2026-SEP-15 (CNBC, Link): buys back Wells Fargo — asset cap lifted a year ago, NIM bottomed, NII growing, lagging the Big 5 by 14% at 1.4x book / 11x earnings; final trade Truist ("another new CEO"); holds BofA through its worst day since Apr 2025 (Q3 IB fees down 10%+, "a yield curve thing"). Weiss (Sep 14): "the banks look great here" into the hike. 2026-SEP-18 (CNBC Halftime): after financials were the week's worst sector (Barclays conference comments, Fed reaction), Sechan splits them into "haves or have nots" - capital-markets banks (JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Goldman) gain from deals, capital raises and fixed-income volatility, while deposit-driven banks may see net interest margins compressed. Snipe keeps Goldman (best of breed in IB despite softer Q3 FICC guidance) and Apollo. Chris Whalen (2026-SEP-19), dissent: bank stocks have been "pretty much dead this year", with no large caps in the leadership group. Wells Fargo, Fifth Third and Huntington report deposit rates rising after six quarters of falling interest expense, "a remarkable turn". He owns only low-credit-risk Schwab and turnaround Flagstar, and faults Bank of America's bond book at 1.5pt below market.