I find banks really boring.  It doesn’t help that I used to work at a bank and when I was a CPA, I used to audit banks.  Every day on the bank audit it was like pouring hot coffee in my lap….excruciatingly painful.

Doing my nightly chart scans, I came across a bank that has an interesting chart, seems to be faring reasonably well financially and is a multi-billion dollar bank selling for around $5.

The bank is Marshall & Isley Corporation (NYSE: MI) I know!  A NYSE stock on my little blog.  It calls itself a diversified financial services corporation, but scratch the surface and it says “bank”.   I like the chart and think it should be watched for some more bounces, but I also like the news.

MI seems to be very handy at raising capital. They are getting oversubscribed for their issues (2 so far this year) and they are using some of those funds to pay off their dreaded TARP loans.  MI is not out of the woods yet.  They continue to post operating and net losses and still have the same issues that face all banks these days, but they have done a good job cleaning up their balance sheet.  Their “mark to market” adjustment was only $1.5 billion!  That is a lot of bad loans!

The chart:

As you can see from the chart, the pressure on the stock is to rise.  The Stochastics are deeply oversold, but now turning up.  The MACD is bearish, but the histogram indicates the lessening of the bearish trend.  It is still well below the zero line and I would like to see the MACD give more positive indicators before trusting it too much.  Both up and down volume have picked up lately….maybe it is under accumulation again.  You can see from the chart how far it has fallen from its recent high.

Much of this “evidence” of a bounce is anecdotal.  Yesterday, the stock was up 10%.  I would watch it to see if that trend continues.

Good luck and good trading

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