In this piece, we will take a look at the ten best diversified bank stocks to buy now.
With 2024 heading to a close, the banking industry continues to be one of the most dynamic ones. While consumer and media attention has been fixated on technology due to the revolutionary potential offered by artificial intelligence, banks have slowly been adjusting to the market, industry, and economic conditions created by 24 year high interest rates in America.
The usual culprit behind the turmoil is the Federal Reserve. After the mini banking crisis in America last year that saw some of the biggest banks go under, Federal Reserve officials sped up rule changes to ensure that the biggest banks in America can maintain stability. These banks are called Global Systematically Important Banks (GSIBs) and they are selected on the basis of criteria that determine their importance to the global financial systems.
The initial set of these rules called the Basel III Endgame, would significantly increase the capital that GSIBs would have had to set aside to maintain stability. Within these banks, the largest would be required to increase their RiskWeighted Assets (RWAs) to jump. to 20%, with analysts expecting back then that banks would have to set aside their retained earnings (post net income money usually returned to shareholders or used to fund growth) for as much as four years to fund the. new requirements.
Naturally, the big banks weren’t pleased. Not only did the new rules propose disallowing the banks’ use of internal risk models to determine capital requirements, but they also targeted non interest income by including it in the calculations for determining operational risk. This income stream covers different areas, such as fees from payment processing and card transactions, and it had become a great way for big banks in particular to beef up their income statement during 2020 when interest rates were at a historic low. According to data from S&P Market Intelligence, banks with assets greater than $10 billion saw their noninterest income rise by 3.5% between Q1 2021 and Q1 2022. The growth trend was sharper for the broader industry over a longer horizon. Between Q1 2019 and Q1 2022, net interest income for US banks fell by 0.89% while noninterest income jumped by 17.2%.
The resistance from the banks worked, as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell shared with Congress in March that he was “confident that the final product will be one that has broad support at the Fed and in the broader world.” The Fed Chair was particularly moved by results from an independent study that showed that 97% of the comments submitted in response to the rules were critical of them. The banks’ push back came right when Basel regulators proposed changing the way in which big banks calculate their GSIB surcharge, to prevent them from window dressing their risk metrics at year end. According to calculations from Reuters, a 0.5% reduction in the GSIB surcharge saves America’s top two biggest banks a cumulative $16 billion, and the changes in this area could require the banks to use the average of their daily risk values during the reporting year.
Powell’s comments were followed by Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr announcing in September that the new rules would now require big banks’ capital to increase by 9% as opposed to 19%. For banks with assets lower than $250 billion, their capital would increase between 3% to 4%, Barr added. The Fed official commented to reporters that “there are benefits and costs to increasing capital requirements. The changes we intend to make will bring these two important objectives into better balance, in light of the feedback we have received.”
Sounds good right? Think again, as banks and their investors weren’t pleased. The day Barr announced the new rules, the S&P’s bank stock index dropped by 2.70% before paring some of the losses to close 0.82% lower. However, bank investors weren’t disappointed only by the new rules. They were also digesting comments from top banking executives at the Barclays conference in New York; comments which saw the bank stock index drop by 3.1% the day after Barr released the vastly friendlier rules to close 1% lower.
At the conference, Goldman’s CEO warned that the bank could experience a 10% drop in trading revenue or the revenue that it earns from trading fixed income securities, currencies, and commodities. Citi CFO Mark Mason warned that market revenue could drop by 4%, while JPM’s operations chief Daniel Pino warned investors that their net interest income expectations were too high. The bank’s shares fell by 7.5% and closed the day 5.2% lower.
However, not all is dour for bank stock investors. According to McKinsey’s 2023 Annual Banking Review, the industry’s net interest margin improvements courtesy of high interest rates grew profits by $280 billion in 2022 and bumped the return on equity (ROE) to 12%. Global banking net income sat at a six year high of $1.3 trillion in 2022, and the report projected it to further grow to $1.4 trillion in 2023.
With these details in mind, let’s take a look at the best diversified bank stocks to buy.
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Our Methodology
To make our list of the best diversified bank stocks to buy, we ranked the 40 largest diversified banks in the world traded on the NASDAQ or NYSE by their market capitalization and picked out the stocks with the highest number of hedge fund investors in Q2 2024.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points. (see more details here).
10. The Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Limited (NYSE:NTB)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q2 2024: 19
The Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Limited (NYSE:NTB) is a Bahamas based bank with operations in the UK, Canada, Switzerland, and other countries. Its shares have done modestly well over the past twelve months and are up by 27%. Since it’s a diversified bank, The Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Limited (NYSE:NTB) has a well managed income statement. Out of its $143 million revenue for the second quarter, 38.8% was accounted for by noninterest income. Within this segment, $13 million was from Trust services, which provides The Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Limited (NYSE:NTB) with a stable business as trusts are often built on consumer confidence and trust in the banking institution. They are also a specialized vehicle, which provides the bank with competitive advantages, and The Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Limited (NYSE:NTB) has also benefited by on boarding Credit Suisse’s assets which has helped it grow its presence in Singapore’s lucrative trust market. Additionally, the bank could see growing revenue from portfolio investments if interest rate cuts materialize and equity markets start to appreciate.
During its Q2 2024 earnings call, The Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Limited (NYSE:NTB)’s management shared details about its asset management, which could create headwinds if improperly managed:
“We’re just naturally asset sensitive because we’re 40% lent, right? Essentially, our [indiscernible] deposits are seasoned over time and the lending preference in our lending markets is for floating rate. And so, hat gives rise to that sort of what we call structural asset sensitivity for us. We feel pretty good about the OCI burn down path that we’re on. Obviously, there’s always discussions around, should we be doing something different in securities portfolio and re-ladder at this point. But I think, at the moment, we’re pretty committed to the path. We have, I think, a visibility now of a rate path or at least a direction of rate path that gives us some confidence around OCI burn down and, therefore, a tangible book value growth.
But it’s something that we often discuss in terms of longer term, what is the level of fixed rate that we want to have on the books, whether it’s loans or investment securities versus floating rate. And because we don’t have a lender of last resort or a central bank, we’re naturally just going to have a lot of liquidity because, essentially, we need to manage our own treasury operations across the four different banking jurisdictions. And so, that gives rise to a further increase in asset sensitivity because, obviously, we test – we use VAR and min max inflow/outflows to kind of estimate how much cash we need to hold. So I think the reality is, we – having been in Bermuda banks for a long time – are yet to see some structural action. But I think we’re probably always going to be a bit asset sensitive through the cycle.
I think the fees give us a great sort of buffer. They’re very stable, capital efficient. But other than that, it’s an ongoing discussion, but nothing really to report.”
9. Barclays PLC (NYSE:BCS)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q2 2024: 20
Barclays PLC (NYSE:BCS) is a British banking giant that operates in investment banking, investment management, wealth management, retail banking, and other industries. Based on its income distribution, during H1 2024, £6.3 billion of the bank’s £13.2 billion in income was from its investment banking division. If you read the introduction to our piece, you’d have learned that a recent conference saw banking officials cautioned about dropping interest income. However, at the same event, they also shared optimism for investment banking, which could prove to be a positive catalyst for Barclays PLC (NYSE:BCS). However, £3.7 billion of the income is via Barclays PLC (NYSE:BCS)’s Barclays UK division which can struggle in the future. Interest rates in the UK are also at historic highs, and unlike the US, the British economy is not growing as fast. Analysts also expect that British customers might increase their mortgage defaults due to the higher rates, which might not bode well for Barclays PLC (NYSE:BCS).
However, Barclays PLC (NYSE:BCS)’s management believes that it can see tailwinds from a slow rate cut cycle (which also means headwinds if things speed up). It has also created hedges to ensure stability in its income statement and UK divison earnigs:
“We have also updated our UK rate expectations for 2024, and now assume one base rate cut to 5% by the end of the year. Together, these trends mean that we have increased our 2024 guidance for Group NII, ex-investment bank and head office, to circa GBP11 billion for the full year, up from GBP10.7 billion. Within this, NII guidance for Barclays UK increased from $6.1 billion to circa $6.3 billion, excluding the Tesco Bank acquisition. A further UK rate cut to 4.75% towards the end of the year, which is currently assumed in the latest consensus, would not materially change NII this year. Moving on to the structural hedge on Slide 10. As a reminder, the structural hedge is designed to reduce volatility in NII and manage interest rate risk. As rates have risen, the hedge has dampened the growth in our NII, and in a falling rate environment, we will see the benefit from the protection that it gives us.
The expected NII tailwind from the hedge is significant and predictable. GBP11.7 billion of aggregate gross income is now locked in over the three years to the end of 2026, up from GBP9.3 billion at Q1. We have around GBP170 billion of hedges maturing between 2024 and 2026 at an average yield of 1.5%. As we said in February, reinvesting around three quarters of this around 3.5% would compound over the next three years to increase the structural hedge income in 2026 by circa $2 billion versus 2023. In response to greater stability in customer and client deposit behavior, we have slightly increased the average duration. Given the high proportion of balances hedged and the programmatic approach we take, we are relatively insensitive to the short-term impact of potential rate cuts.”
