Why Traders Are Piling Into Bank of America Corp (BAC)

Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC) shares have surged 2.33% to around $24 per share in late Thursday afternoon trading as some investors pile back into ‘Trump Trade’ names. Although Congress failed to bring to a vote a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, many investors still believe President Trump has the political capital/authority to enact various other parts of his agenda, such as lowering taxes, loosening regulations on Wall Street, and stimulating economic growth. If the economic growth accelerates, Bank of America will likely benefit from higher interest rates and lower loans losses.

In addition, Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC) is also in the news due to a Wall Street Journal article stating that Merrill Lynch will be restructuring some of its leadership to make the overall bank be more tightly integrated. The management shuffle/restructuring in the brokerage division could ultimately pay dividends in the long run by improving efficiency.

What Does The Smart Money Sentiment Say?

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 39.7% gains over the past 12 months and outperformed the 24.1% gain enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs. Our enhanced small-cap hedge fund strategy returned more than 45% over the last 12 months and outperformed SPY by more than 30 percentage points over the last 4.5 years (see details here).

According to our data, the smart money was more bullish in the fourth quarter than in the third quarter. Of the 742 total elite funds in our database, 139 top funds owned shares of Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC) at the end of December, up 27 funds from the previous quarter. Boykin Curry‘s Eagle Capital Management was one of the new funds in Q4, having established a new stake of 34.3 million shares.

The Bottom Line

Traders are hitting the buy button on Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC) as the Trump trade revs up again and as sentiment improves. For those you interested, check out this article about the biggest commercial banks in New York City.

Disclosure:None

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