To: Joshua Yoon who wrote (164 ) 5/20/1999 4:32:00 PM From: Islander Read Replies (1) | Respond to
To anyone who had not previously experienced an orchestrated short attack on your holding, it is my opinion (if you were long) that now you have! Not very nice, is it? The facts seem to be that the internet banks pose a real threat to regional banks that is perceived by the latter as urgent and immediate. Sure, regionals can catch up in terms of net service, but not for a long time in terms of margins and scalability, as they are brick and mortar institutions with tremendous overheads. So it is pretty 'convenient' if a friendly banking 'analyst' publicizes a Sell recommendation out of the blue and gets this on various newswires and internet sites. Margin calls, more selling, more shorting, and perhaps even an influential financial newsletter writer gets his trailing 20% stop-loss hit and he throws in the towel. The regional bank directors celebrate in their boardrooms hopeful that now internet banks will be perceived as unstable as their stock price. Well, they are wrong! Internet banks are here to stay, just as online billing, purchasing, and everything else is. So what now? Well, soon the shorts will have to cover, the underwriters of the net banks will point out, once again the relative economies of scale, convenience, deposit rates, and growth rates. They will issue BUY recommendations, there will be more buying, and more short covering, and the pendulum will swing the other way. If you bought way high and are still here, my empathies. It is no fun. But as far as the long run goes, I am confident in TFBC as an investment. That is what it is all about. An investment, not a trade. And the long run may be shorter than you think. I am buying more.
