I see also that one of Marty Whitman's Third Avenue funds has also gone into these community bank stocks. I note they recently purchased RCKB, according to their letter to stockholders. You might want to peruse:
thirdavenuefunds.com
I don't have a position in this one. And I'm not planning to buy any others either. These stocks just are so very difficult for me to understand and to value. One standard measure is 'efficiency ratio', but I don't use it because it's too time consuming and not worth it to me for my small buys to be digging around in companies' balance sheets for the numbers. I prefer using another standard, roa, and by that measure, the low numbers community banks generally seem to show (under .75), seem to indicate relatively poor performance.
There's one bank I recently added to, VNBC. I posted on it, but somehow I don't see that post now. Must have forgotten to hit the right send key. Anyway, VNBC is a pretty aggressive construction lender in California. So while it shows better numbers than some other banks in our discussion (e.g. has higher roa, higher dividend, with maybe a comparable p/e and p/bk), it may also be a riskier stock.
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