Citigroup Shares Break $5 but Close Lower

Citigroup shares rose early Thursday to break through $5 for the first time in roughly six months but the stock couldn't hold the level and ended in negative territory.
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Updated for Bove comments, closing share price.

NEW YORK. (

TheStreet

) --

Citigroup

(C) - Get Report

shares finally pushed past the $5 mark on Thursday for the first time since mid-October but proved unable to finish there.

The stock closed at $4.81, down 12 cents, for the session. with volume totaling more than 1.5 billion, an incredible three times above the issue's trailing three-month daily average of around 506 million. At their peak, the shares rose as high as $5.07 but they began to pull back around midday and couldn't recover before the bell sounded.

The last time Citigroup's stock closed at or above $5 was October 14. The bank stocks began to rally in earnest in March on signs of stabilization in the economy and the expectation that credit costs have likely peaked. A strong first-quarter report from

JPMorgan Chase

(JPM) - Get Report

on Wednesday has sent the group to new highs this week, although Citigroup's own 52-week high of $5.43, set on August 28, 2009, has remained out of reach.

Kill All the Bankers! (Forbes)

The $5 level is considered important because many institutional investors aren't able to hold stocks that trade below there.

Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove told

TheStreet

he thinks the stock has more upside from here because of the successful IPO of

Primerica

(PRI) - Get Report

has given rise to positive sentiment that assets in the company's Citi Holdings "bad bank" portfolio may have significant value.

"The real book value of this company is substantially above what it's being reported at and the capital is higher than what it's being reported at," Bove says. "So from an asset play standpoint, Citi has become a very cheap stock and that's why people are bidding it up. It's a change in the way people are looking at and analyzing the company."

Citigroup received a total of $45 billion in taxpayer bailout funds as the financial crisis intensified. The U.S. government still owns 7.7 billion shares, or roughly 27% of the company's outstanding common stock. The Treasury's disposal of its stake was once considered a major overhang for the shares. But the

the government indicated in late March

that it plans to exit that stake this year, and the stock continued a rally that now has it up nearly 50% year-to-date. Since Treasury's lock-up period on its stake expired on March 16, the shares have gained 24.7%.

Citigroup is slated to report its first-quarter results on Monday. Analysts on average are expecting the company to breakeven on a per share basis with revenue projected at $20.77 billion, according to

Thomson Reuters

.

--Written by Laurie Kulikowski in New York.