My first time doing a Skype interview for cable TV from my office! I have to say, I'm impressed considering the other guest had professional studios.
So, the bank earnings were decent, no disasters. While the media may paint it negatively, it's easier to cherry pick a few grim sound bites from the conference call rather than dig into the numbers and see through the noise.
The heart of the matter is clear: the average stock has been going down for six weeks, while Apple and the hot tech stocks have been ripping higher. As a contrarian, and someone who was at ground zero for the 2000 dot.com disaster, I just don't care for the buy high and sell higher routine, preferring to buy what's on sale with some margin of safety. I see the banks, or broadly speaking the Russel 1000 Value index (think the biggest cheap stocks that don't include the FANMAG names), along with some smaller areas like the MLPs and REITs are more my cup of tea when putting new cash to work. Why? Overall, the market is above what I calculate as more of the fair value of the SP500 - closer to 2800 than 3200. We saw that value can rise again back in late May into June, so it's not dead. However, you need to have a longer time line than the next month. Put another way, either the unloved areas show some signs of life - or it's bearish for the general markets. A bull market can't live on a few stocks going higher. But few remember what happened 20 years ago, and nobody said history has to repeat.
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