Exchange-traded funds that buy bank stocks jumped Tuesday as investors assessed Wall Street’s latest batch of second-quarter earnings results from giants including Bank of America and Morgan Stanley.
The Invesco KBW Bank ETF KBWB, +3.05% closed up slightly more than 3% Tuesday, while the SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF KRE, +4.22% surged 4.2%, according to FactSet data. Morgan Stanley MS, +6.45% finished among the S&P 500’s best-performing stocks Tuesday, after reporting earnings that beat expectations even as its quarterly profit dropped from a year earlier, with its shares soaring 6.5%.
?”It was a busy morning as Morgan Stanley posted mixed results, while Bank of America impressed,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst for the Americas at Oanda, in a note Tuesday. ?“We are done with the majority of the big banks and the overall takeaway is that they did ok despite a weakening economy and all the turmoil that stemmed from the regional banking crisis last quarter.
The SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF, which tracks an equal-weighted index of U.S. regional bank stocks, on Tuesday saw its best daily performance since June 6 , according to FactSet data. The fund has surged 12% so far this month, putting it on track for potentially its strongest monthly performance since February 2021, FactSet data show.
Bank stocks broadly outperformed the S&P 500 on Tuesday, helping to buoy the popular gauge of large-cap U.S. equities. The S&P 500 SPX, +0.71% closed 0.7% higher.
Bank of America BAC, +4.42%, whose shares climbed 4.4% Tuesday after reporting better-than-expected earnings, and Morgan Stanley are among the biggest holdings of the market-capitalization-weighted Invesco KBW Bank ETF. As of July 17, JPMorgan Chase & Co. JPM, +0.18%, Wells Fargo & Co. WFC, +1.92% and Goldman Sachs Group GS, +3.08% were also among the fund’s top positions, according to its holdings data on Invesco’s website.
The Invesco KBW Bank ETF notched on Tuesday its biggest daily gain since June 2, but the fund is still down double-digits so far this year, FactSet data show.
Bank ETFs are bouncing from their 2023 lows hit in the wake of regional bank failures earlier this year that included Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse in March. The Invesco KBW Bank ETF remains down 15% this year through Tuesday, while the SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF has tumbled slightly more than 22% in 2023.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500’s 18.6% gains so far this year have been driven by Big Tech stocks including megacap companies Apple Inc. AAPL, -0.13%, Microsoft Corp. MSFT, +3.98% and Nvidia Corp. NVDA, +2.22%, but there have been signs of the rally broadening.
A fund that focuses on a version of the S&P 500 that equally weights the index’s stocks, the Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF RSP, +0.62%, is up 2.4% so far this month. That’s similar to the rise of the cap-weighted S&P 500, which is heavily exposed to the tech sector.
The U.S. stock market closed broadly higher Tuesday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.06% climbing 1.1% and the Nasdaq Composite COMP, +0.76% gaining 0.8%, according to FactSet data.