Each week, Industry Focus: Financials host Jason Moser and Fool.com contributor Matt Frankel, CFP, discuss a stock that's jumped toward the top of their watchlist. In this segment, Moser explains why Amalgamated Bank (AMAL +1.13%) has caught his eye, while Frankel thinks investors should take a look at General Electric (GE 1.18%) after its recent analyst downgrade.
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This video was recorded on April 8, 2019.
Jason Moser: OK, Matt, let's wrap this up. We've got One to Watch for all of our listeners. What's your one to watch coming up this week?
Matt Frankel: I am watching GE, General Electric. I have a pretty big position in my portfolio. They were just downgraded today by an analyst. The stock dropped 6% last I looked. The point I wanted to make with this. it's not necessarily about GE's business. We all know GE's problems. [laughs] Yeah, there's no surprise. The point is, when the problems are already known, and analysts downgrade it, and it plunges, it can be a good buying opportunity. Is GE's business worth 7% less than it was yesterday? No. So, I'm considering adding to my position at this level. It's just a good lesson, to watch a few stocks after analyst downgrades. They generally -- in my experience, anyway -- shoot right back up to where they were.
Moser: Yeah. It's funny. If you see one that's downgraded based on valuation, I think those are the ones you really need to pay attention to. They can oftentimes represent opportunities because valuation is as much art as it is science. Again, valuation is more or less an opinion. And you know what they say about opinions, Matt. I'm not going to go over it here on the show. I think a lot of people out there know what they say about opinions. [laughs]
I'm going to go with Amalgamated Bank this week, ticker AMAL. If you listened to last week's show, you heard our interview with CEO Keith Mestrich. Amalgamated Bank is a really interesting story, building America's socially responsible bank. That resonated with a lot of listeners. I got a lot of positive feedback from this interview. It's a small-cap bank up in New York. Still fairly small bank. Total deposits of little bit more than $4 billion, total assets just under $5 billion. I think that based on what they're trying to do, in building this socially responsible bank, it's resonating on a customer base that is really liking being a partner of Amalgamated, and liking what that company, what that bank represents for the future. I think that socially responsible investing is something that's going to become more important to investors as time goes on here. It seems like Amalgamated is really helping blaze that trail.
If you didn't get to listen to that interview from last week, go check it out. It was, again, CEO Keith Mestrich. He had a lot of great things to say, a lot of neat things we learned from speaking with Keith. We're very grateful to have had that chance.
