Regions Financial (NYSE:RF) Profitable - Good Last Week; Bad This Week?
Wait, I thought everything was fine with financials?
It is funny how the same news one week has such a different perception the next week;
Regions Financial (NYSE:RF) reported this morning and like every bank it's benefiting from yield curve and refinance boom but this is being offset by larger loss provisions. This is one volatile name, didn't I just sell off a good portion of this Friday at $7.50? Now it's back below $5.00. A few other banks I like such as
Northern Trust (NTRS) (not a traditional commercial bank) and
US Bancorp (USB) are being slaughtered today in similar fashion. Because as we all know (all together kids!) its student body left (or right) trading - everything is bad in a sector or everything is good.
I'll add some RF at $5.00 and use this as my proxy on commercial banking similar to how I used
Excel Maritime (EXM) as my proxy on dry bulk shipping over the past few months. (speaking of which I had a limit buy order at $6.00 and EXM went to $6.05 this morning before rebounding 10% - sigh) I am still looking at one of those regional banking ETFs we discussed last week (
Apr 16: Three Banking ETFs to Play your Taxpayer Money Funneled into Financials), but since I have the very volatile RF I will focus on it for now.
Via
Reuters
- Regions Financial Corp (RF) said first-quarter profit dropped 92 percent, but the lender reported record mortgage production and strong deposit growth. Low mortgage rates led to an upswing in loan production, and mortgage income doubled from the 2008 fourth quarter, reaching $73 million, the lender said on Tuesday. Total customer deposits and low-cost deposits grew 4 percent.
- Nonperforming assets as a percentage of loans and other real estate increased to 2.43 percent from 1.76 percent in the 2008 fourth quarter.
- Net income attributable to common shareholders declined to $26 million, or 4 cents a share, from $337 million, or 48 cents per share, a year earlier.
- The first quarter's provision for loan losses was $425 million, down from $1.15 billion in the prior quarter.
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