There are good banks and bad banks. How do you distinguish between the two? Which of the seemingly innumerable metrics and quantitative measures should you rely on in your analysis?
The bad news is that most figures cited in the financial media about banks are irrelevant noise. The good news, on the other hand, is that there are really only two that matter -- or, to be more precise, that matter demonstrably more than the rest.
Indeed, by nailing these two traits, investors can realistically hope to earn the same type of phenomenal compound annual growth rates that the likes of M&T Bank (MTB 0.71%), U.S. Bancorp (USB 1.45%), and Wells Fargo (WFC 0.64%) have returned for their shareholders over the past three decades.
