Sift through the wreckage of beaten-down companies, and you'll likely find a few wonderful stocks. Lately, the stock market has blessed patient investors with plenty of thrashed financial companies.

But the savviest investors know that willy-nilly contrarianism isn't a sure path to riches. As financial disasters Washington Mutual (NYSE:WM) and E*Trade Financial (NASDAQ:ETFC) illustrate, companies often get punished for all the right reasons. And in those cases, their plight can be as bad as you think, and worse.

With that in mind, I used our new Motley Fool CAPS screening tool to find beaten-down financial stocks the online CAPS community loves to hate. These are the stocks CAPS players avoid like the plague.

They're also:

  • Capitalized at more than $200 million.
  • Down at least 25% over the past year.
  • Rated one star, the lowest possible rank out of five, by our CAPS community.

Remember, in the first year for which we have data, one-star companies flamed out with an average loss of nearly 17%.

Company

Share Price

Market Cap (in billions)

Capital One (NYSE:COF)

$35.70

$13.4

National City (NYSE:NCC)

$3.77

$2.9

Regions Financial (NYSE:RF)

$7.13

$5.0

UBS (NYSE:UBS)

$18.64

$40.4

Wachovia (NYSE:WB)

$9.84

$19.6

Data from Motley Fool CAPS and Yahoo! Finance as of July 14.

Are these companies poised for a turnaround? Or is the pain just beginning? Come and join us at CAPS to let us know what you think. Our 110,000-strong (and counting) CAPS community wants to hear your opinion.

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