The rhetoric surrounding the banking industry is decidedly bearish. Demand for mortgage loans is falling off a cliff, after all, and 2021's red-hot investment banking market is clearly cooling. These are arguably the two top reasons the usually docile Dow Jones U.S. Bank Index is down 22% since the beginning of the year.
There have been a few exceptions to this selling, but JPMorgan Chase (JPM 0.06%) isn't one of them. Its shares are down 26% year to date, with last week's earnings-prompted price pop failing to resolve much of this year's weakness.
If you can ignore all the noise and take a detailed look at what's actually happening here, however, there's more to like about JPMorgan than not. That's why the recent weakness is ultimately a long-term buying opportunity.
JPMorgan isn't just mortgages and investment banking
Yes, like all other lenders, JPMorgan Chase's mortgage business is imploding. Home-lending revenue fell by a third last quarter, on a year-over-year basis, while its mortgage fee and related income were nearly cut in half. Its investment banking business was also nearly halved year over year during the recently ended three-month stretch.
It's not the end of the world, though.
Have you ever stopped to look at just how diversified this company is? You know it offers conventional banking services to consumers, and of course, it's a player in the investment banking arena. Neither of these business lines accounts for the bulk of the organization's business, however. That's why the aforementioned slowdowns may not mean nearly as much as some investors might fear.
The graphic below puts things in their proper perspective. Investment banking revenue is contracting from fantastic levels seen back in 2021, but it was never a particularly big business for the company. Neither was home lending, making its current weakness not so terrifying. What's always been relatively big (and still is) for JPMorgan Chase are its wealth management arm, credit cards, and consumer banking. The latter accounts for roughly one-fourth of its revenue, while wealth management generates on the order of 15% of it; credit cards and auto loans typically make up just a tad more. Its wealth management business and consumer banking business saw record revenue for the company's third fiscal quarter ending in September, while cards and auto loans got close to a record of their own.
Data source: JPMorgan Chase. Chart by author. All figures are in millions of dollars.
Perhaps the most overlooked profit center, however, is the company's bond-trading business. Its revenue has been fairly volatile since 2019, but it's always a big piece of JPMorgan's top-line mix (around 15% of its revenue). Last quarter was no exception.
What's not a big deal? Curiously, aside from investment banking and mortgages, JPMorgan doesn't handle a great deal of stock trading or corporate lending.
Revenues aren't profits, of course. But, this is where things get particularly interesting. See the black dotted line moving from left to right on the chart? That's JPMorgan Chase's net interest income, or profits driven by interest rate-based products after the company pays its own interest rate-based expenses. Demand for loans may be waning, but the profitability of existing loans or new loans still being made is -- for the time being anyway -- outpacing the downside of rising interest rates.
Holding up far better than it was supposed to
As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words (or perhaps more than a thousand words in this instance). The company's investment banking and mortgage lending business may be hitting a wall. When the entirety of JPMorgan's businesses is put in this visual perspective, though, we can see that a narrowly focused narrative ignores critical details regarding the big bank's revenue mix. More than that, little to none of the recent rhetoric has pointed out how JPMorgan Chase's net interest income is soaring despite the current lousy environment.
In this light, next year's projected per-share profits of $12.73 (versus $11.47 this year) are not only plausible but probable. The stock's only priced at 9.3 times next year's expected earnings as well, and it offers a dividend yield of 3.6% for today's buyers.
None of this guarantees the stock won't move lower before moving higher again, to be sure. Yet from a risk-versus-reward perspective, JPM is a compelling buy simply because things aren't nearly as bad for it and the banking business as they've been made out to be this year.
