BAC is up 76.26% YTD. Pretty much everything the article says makes sense, and I'm happy I closed my BofA account years ago, but at $5 I had to snatch up some of that stock. I hardly regret the decision.
And BAC is also down -30.2% if you started at one full year from today, or -80% if you go back 5 full years. You can find a way to make almost any stock look attractive if you choose the right starting point.
I don't think his starting point is arbitrary - the article referred to BAC at around 5 in December. Since the beginning of December when it closed at 5.53 BAC has beaten the Vanguard financials ETF by over 59 points (and SPX by over 67).
There are worse banks. For example, Regions Financial quietly slid into positive tangible common equity with the $900M offering last week (for the past few years it was actually negative ...)
The footnotes to the company’s latest financial statements tell the story.
There, the Birmingham, Alabama-based lender disclosed that the loans on its books
were worth $8.1 billion less than what its balance sheet said, as of Dec. 31. By
comparison, the company’s tangible common equity, a bare-bones measure of net worth,
was $7.6 billion.
So if it weren’t for the inflated loan values, Regions’ tangible common equity would
have been less than zero, with liabilities exceeding hard assets.
EDIT: fixed formatting -- I wish that there were a way to indicate that a quoted block should be wrapped