Dick Bove: Crazy-Smart, or Just Crazy?

Ironically, Citi happens to be Bove's top pick, with Bank of America(BAC Quote) his second favorite. He has buy ratings on both.

Bove says everything Citi CEO Vikram Pandit has done so far, less than a year into his reign, "has been correct."

"He has not made one mistake," Bove says, regarding Pandit's decisions to re-energize the global firm through management changes, workforce reductions and asset sales.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Bove has been vocal this year regarding his disappointment with the large brokerages. He has sell ratings on Goldman Sachs(GS Quote) and Merrill Lynch(MER Quote), and hold ratings on Lehman Brothers(LEH Quote) and Morgan Stanley(MS Quote), "but it's not because I like their business models; it's because they're cheap," Bove says.

Another example of Bove's down-to-earth demeanor was in an April note on Merrill, where he admitted that he was as at a loss to explain the firm's poor first-quarter earnings.

"It would be disingenuous of me to indicate that I understood what has happened at Merrill Lynch in the first quarter or that I had any rational way to estimate what the company's earnings are likely to be going forward," he wrote at the time. "[I]t appears to me that the company has provided bits and pieces of data sprinkled through its relatively sparse press release that almost tries to make it more difficult than normal to figure out what has happened."

Still, Bove sees value in the bank stocks.

"The market capitalizations are below the liquidation values," he says. "You're buying these things at a staggeringly low price relative to what it would cost to create one.