Article: Is This the Best Bank in the Southwest?

The next six articles in my “Fool Revisited” series (going up today and tomorrow) are going to be pretty similar. Like my last article, they are going to be about smaller, regional banks. In what I thought was going to be a winning formula going forward – I planned to return to similar articles as a writer in the future – I screened banks based on the region they fell under using FinViz.com, my screener of choice back when I was writing for the Fool (it still is pretty cool, though a lot of the things I used it for in the past are no longer free and I don’t have the resources at present to pay for them).

The first of the articles covers banks from the Southwest Region of the United States, which is defined for these purposes as banks based in or with the majority of their operations in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. Instead of writing about all 20+ banks in the region, I screened them down to a much more manageable list. First, I eliminated all banks with a market cap below $300 million. Then I used four other factors to get to my final list: only profitable banks (over the prior 12 months), a low P/B (looks like I only featured banks under 2, though lower is better), a positive dividend, and quality net income margin. Continue reading “FR: Is This the Best Bank in the Southwest?” →