I love bargain stocks, especially when they're hitting 52-week lows. Still, it can be instructive to also look at stocks that are riding high.

For one thing, they can make good sell candidates. More optimistically, we may be able to find a few companies that can continue their upward climbs.

In this series, I'll be searching industry by industry for stocks reaching 52-week highs. That way, we'll be able to make a few quick comparisons among semi-related companies.

There are 24 industry groups as defined by the Global Industry Classification Standard. Banking is one of them.

Below are the top seven companies in this space (by market cap) that are within spitting distance of their 52-week highs.

Company

Recent Price

52-week Low

52-week High

Price-to-Tangible-Book Ratio

Banco Bradesco (NYSE: BBD)

$21.80

$15.17

$22.70

3.5

Toronto-Dominion Bank (NYSE: TD)

$73.21

$56.60

$77.57

3.5

Bank of Nova Scotia (NYSE: BNS)

$53.42

$40.40

$54.85

3.0

Banco Santander (Brasil) S.A. (NYSE: BSBR)

$14.71

$9.82

$15.54

2.0

Bank of Montreal (NYSE: BMO)

$60.40

$45.88

$65.68

2.1

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (NYSE: CM)

$76.34

$56.56

$78.11

3.1

ICICI Bank (NYSE: IBN)

$51.51

$31.03

$53.13

2.5

Source: Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's, and Yahoo! Finance. Data as of Oct. 25.

I use the price-to-tangible book ratio as an initial sanity check on valuation. Ideally, I love buying banks with a value below 1.5. For those unfamiliar with the metric, it's the price-to-book ratio subtracting out intangibles like goodwill. In other words, it's a more stringent way of seeing how cheap a bank is by comparing its price to its equity (or book value).

Not terribly surprisingly, each of these foreign banks (all seven are based outside the U.S.) are well above my 1.5 threshold. Be careful.

For a list of the bank stock 52-week lows, click here.

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