Tuesday's Financial Winners & Losers
Financial stocks jumped Tuesday and outperformed the struggling major indices thanks to a few shots of good news.
The
NYSE
Financial Sector Index was up 50.39 points, or 0.5%, to 9,499.14 as members
Bank of America
(BAC) - Get Report
and
UBS
(UBS) - Get Report
gained on positive analyst calls.
Goldman Sachs restarted coverage of BofA with a buy rating, citing $22.5 billion in unrealized equity gains in the Charlotte, N.C., bank's strategic investment portfolio. BofA shares added 1.7% to $51.49, also in support of the KBW Bank Index, which was recently up 0.2% to 108.51.
UBS climbed 2.6%, meanwhile, after JP Morgan said losses at its fixed-income business -- which, as UBS warned Monday, will help induce an overall third-quarter loss -- will force the Swiss bank to shift its focus away from those risky operations. The analyst upgraded UBS to neutral from underweight.
Education lender
Sallie Mae
(SLM) - Get Report
was also in the green after getting a revised buyout offer. The J.C. Flowers-led investment group that originally agreed to buy Sallie for $60 a share is now offering $50 a share with warrants for a per-share payout of up to $10, depending on future performance.
Last week, the group
said it wouldn't close the original $25 billion deal due to a new law that will cut subsidies to education lenders. Shares of the Reston, Va., company tacked on $1.23, or 2.5%, to $51.13.
Elsewhere,
IntercontinentalExchange
(ICE) - Get Report
said its ICE Futures U.S. segment saw a 22.4% rise in September average daily volume, while its European segment posted record average volume numbers in that month. Shares rose 0.8% to $155.17.
On the other hand,
TD Bank
(TD) - Get Report
and
Commerce Bancorp
(CBH) - Get Report
both lost ground after the sides signed a merger deal.
TD will pay roughly $8.5 billion in cash and stock in the pact, which should close in March or April of next year. TD expects the purchase to cut its adjusted per-share earnings in fiscal 2008 and be neutral to profits in 2009.
Commerce also announced it will take a $150 million hit in the third quarter after it sells a portion of its fixed-rate investment securities portfolio and reinvests in short-term or floating rate AAA-rated securities.
Canada-based TD surrendered 5.8% at $72.48. Commerce, of Cherry Hill, N.J., was off 0.6% at $39.39.
Maguire Properties
(MPG)
, a Los Angeles-based real estate investment trust, slipped 2.2% on a Bank of America downgrade to sell. Shares lost 59 cents to $26.74.