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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