Holiday Week Wrapup – Russell-ing up signs of trouble in Bank Stocks

Ed Kountz | July 03, 2008, 11:15 AM

Signs of continued difficulty among bank stocks. Russell Investments noted earlier this week that the combined market capitalization of bank and thrift stocks in its Russell 3,000 Index has declined to 17.4%, a drop from 22.4% a year ago.

The current figure is the lowest percentage representation of bank stocks within the Index in 8 years. As of this writing, the market has clawed back some in the last day of a holiday-shortened week, bank stock activity early this week likely took that number down even more. After the last two weeks, a long weekend can't come soon enough.

And if any additional perspective is needed, the average price of gas eight years ago stood at about $1.50 a gallon. Ah, the good old days.

Also this week, BofA’s Strategic Investments Corp. completed a strategic investment in mobile banking and payments provider mFoundry, continuing attention and activity in the space. Other mFoundry investors include Motorola, PayPal and NCR, as well as VC backers Ignition Partners, Apax Partners and others. mFoundry customers include Citi and BB&T, and the firm also has a strategic partnership with ClairMail. As recently noted, overall customer interest in mobile payments remains modest in the U.S., but recent numbers show that consumers are warming to the real-time, always-available nature of mobile banking, services. And as an account-to-account transfer is very similar to a mobile payment, well…you get the rest. LINK