Out Fox The $treet

Synovus Financial (SNV) was hit pretty hard today by the FBR analyst downgrade . The stock slid all the way down to $3.17 or over 8% at one point. Evidently the downgrade caught some investors off guard as it didn't highlight anything new and basically just offered a different opinion to that provided by management. One that should've been a concern of any investor. FBR claimed that SNV wouldn't be profitable this year as management claimed and that the bank wouldn't likely be bought out. Not really sure who would buy an unprofitable regional bank on a buyout hopes other then small retail investors. The whole reason to buy SNV is that they trade very cheaply compared to normalized earnings ( see Tom Brown for more detail ). With the economy turning and the real estate sector likely bottoming out, I'm not sure why FBR is so eager to fight the trend. Clearly management at SNV is too be questioned so I think the fact that it only trades at $3.25 now confirms that conce...

Tom Brown from Bankstocks.com has some interesting points about Regions Financial (RF) and the banking industry sector as a whole from the Barclays conference. Tom is well known as one of the top banking analysts in the industry. Hes also known for being too positive and upbeat about the crisis that took place the last couple year. Whats interesting is that based on the information presented about RF, it may turn out that he wasn't that far off base. What it turns out is that the government and the naysayers were way off base in their worst case estimates. Estimates that just about brought down the global economy. Government “stress test” loss estimates are way too high. I’ve said this ever since the test results were released back in tk. Now, two quarters into the eight quarters the tests cover, and with high visibility into a third quarter, the tests’ excessive pessimism is more obvious than ever. None of the 19 big banks that were tested will come anywhere close to reaching th...