8 Asian Banks Near 52-Week Lows

If you're aiming to "buy low and sell high," then it makes infinite sense to start your search with bargain-priced stocks. Regularly reviewing a list of stocks trading near their 52-week lows can be a great first step.

Here, I'll try to do the initial legwork for you. To prevent us from being inundated with scores of disparate companies, I'll conduct my search by industry. This will allow us to make some initial comparisons among semi-related companies.

Today, let's look at some Asian bank stocks. Below are eight banks that are within 20% of their 52-week lows and have market caps above $200 million.

Company	Recent Price	52-Week Low	52-Week High	Trailing P/E Ratio	Price-to-Book Ratio
Mizuho Financial Group (NYSE: MFG  )	$2.84	$2.67	$4.27	7.1	0.6
Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (NYSE: SMFG  )	$5.42	$5.35	$7.77	6.3	0.6
Shinhan Financial Group (NYSE: SHG  )	$76.59	$71.96	$101.34	7.3	0.7
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (NYSE: MTU  )	$4.18	$4.13	$5.68	5.2	0.5
Woori Finance Holdings (NYSE: WF  )	$29.44	$28.29	$42.96	4.8	0.5
KB Financial Group (NYSE: KB  )	$37.86	$36.16	$55.46	23.9	0.8
ICICI Bank (NYSE: IBN  )	$38.15	$34.66	$58.22	16.7	1.9
HDFC Bank (NYSE: HDB  )	$32.34	$27.79	$38.29	25.9	4.1

Sources: Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's, and Yahoo! Finance.

Like their U.S. and European counterparts, there are a number of Asian banks trading below book value and for P/E ratios under 10. One thing to note is that both of the Indian banks above (ICICI and HDFC) are trading for much higher price-to-book ratios than their Japanese and Korean counterparts.

With any foreign investment, you have to take into account country-specific factors. That said, one truism holds worldwide: The banks that look expensive can certainly be better values than their deeply discounted peers. Keep that in mind if you start diving in further. For all our Foolish analysis on any of these stocks, add it to My Watchlist.