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WFC - Wells Fargo


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On CNBC this morning Buffett said he bought more WFC in the last week.

 

Not a surprise. 

I assume he'll continue to be opportunistic and keep on buying on dips until he hits the 10% limit on ownership.

 

Maybe the stock is just cheap, dip or no dip. 

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I am seeing that there was very large volume on the the Wells Fargo warrants (2018).  I show over 1.5 million traded today -- this seems like 30 or 40x normal. 

 

Can anyone confirm this? 

 

Was there a very large trade?

 

Thanks guys

Bloomberg says the same...no real price movement...maybe the HFT algo's?

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Is Wells buying back the warrants?

 

Didn't they do that before?

 

Management has board authorization to buy back $450M of tarp warrants, which means they could in theory buy back all the warrants at these prices. But after the initial auction buyback of 70M of the 110M total warrants, their purchases have been tapering off:

 

q3/10: 536k

q4/10: 114k

q1/11: 0

q2/11: 0

q3/11: 167k

q4/11: 98k

q1/12: 0

q2/12: 35k

 

So 725k would represent a significant increase from what they have been doing lately.

 

I guess we'll find out in the 2012 10k if it was them or not.

 

Does look very weird on a chart.  I wonder if Wells (or anyone) negotiated a private purchase, would it show up on the volume chart like this once the transaction is registered?

 

 

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I am thinking about starting a position in WFC (or MTB or USB).  But I am wondering how you guys think about the valuation and growth of the company.  I think that they want to retain about ~50% of earnings.  Do you then say they make 20% on retained earnings so .5*.2=10% earnings growth?

 

Thinking about the underlying economics of the business, wouldn't they take a retained dollar and turn into a loan, which would yield ~4%?  So they have to keep adding leverage to keep a high return on capital, which means ensuring they can keep growing deposits.  How do you guys think about deposit growth?

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I am thinking about starting a position in WFC (or MTB or USB).  But I am wondering how you guys think about the valuation and growth of the company.  I think that they want to retain about ~50% of earnings.  Do you then say they make 20% on retained earnings so .5*.2=10% earnings growth?

 

Thinking about the underlying economics of the business, wouldn't they take a retained dollar and turn into a loan, which would yield ~4%?  So they have to keep adding leverage to keep a high return on capital, which means ensuring they can keep growing deposits.  How do you guys think about deposit growth?

That's the right way of looking at it.

 

Each retained dollar is not turned into a dollar of loan, but $10 of loans from the leverage. Leverage will definitely help return on equity, but it'll likely remain stable going forward (it's also using relatively conservative leverage, for a bank).

 

Your growth will likely come from deposit growth (cross-selling) and enhanced NIMs (getting tougher).

I think conservatively a 50% retention x 1.5% ROA x 10x leverage = ~7.5% growth is reasonable going forward.

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That's the right way of looking at it.

 

Each retained dollar is not turned into a dollar of loan, but $10 of loans from the leverage. Leverage will definitely help return on equity, but it'll likely remain stable going forward (it's also using relatively conservative leverage, for a bank).

 

Your growth will likely come from deposit growth (cross-selling) and enhanced NIMs (getting tougher).

I think conservatively a 50% retention x 1.5% ROA x 10x leverage = ~7.5% growth is reasonable going forward.

 

But you would need to inject the leverage to get to the $10 in loans from the one in retained earnings.  Let me give an example:  Awesome Banks balance sheet is:

 

Loans $100

Deposits $90

Equity $10

 

Loans pay 5%, deposits cost is 0.  So the bank makes $5 in interest on the loan.  After it collects the interest its B/S is:

 

Cash $5

Loans $100

Deposits $90

Equity $15

 

So it only has the $5 to loan out.  It needs to take in more deposits to gear up and keep RoE high, right?

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That's the right way of looking at it.

 

Each retained dollar is not turned into a dollar of loan, but $10 of loans from the leverage. Leverage will definitely help return on equity, but it'll likely remain stable going forward (it's also using relatively conservative leverage, for a bank).

 

Your growth will likely come from deposit growth (cross-selling) and enhanced NIMs (getting tougher).

I think conservatively a 50% retention x 1.5% ROA x 10x leverage = ~7.5% growth is reasonable going forward.

 

But you would need to inject the leverage to get to the $10 in loans from the one in retained earnings.  Let me give an example:  Awesome Banks balance sheet is:

 

Loans $100

Deposits $90

Equity $10

 

Loans pay 5%, deposits cost is 0.  So the bank makes $5 in interest on the loan.  After it collects the interest its B/S is:

 

Cash $5

Loans $100

Deposits $90

Equity $15

 

So it only has the $5 to loan out.  It needs to take in more deposits to gear up and keep RoE high, right?

 

You have to pay tax and operating expenses, but say you net $2, you can then leverage the $2 to $20 using deposits and other borrowings. Most banks are awash in liquidity it is the loan growth that is the difficult part. So you see the leverage shrinking while margins are shrinking, which is reducing the ROE. Hence, why the bank's are mostly trading at a discount to tangible book value.  Note, I think WFC is fairly valued where as there are plenty of banks vastly undervalued.

 

Give it time, and when interest rates rise and loan demand continues to gain steam the financial sector valuations will shoot the moon from current levels. Problem is that is two to three years out. WFC trades at a premium since it has a moat in the home mortgage servicing business.

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