Hello Mr SimpleMeLike, Yeah... ETF's sound good. Is it VOO you referring to? Some options might be the safest bet on some of those banks. As newwurldmn mentioned, the equity and the company can behave differently.
They just bailed out CS and it is at the very low already. Downside is limited. Now, $1.95 total downside is $1.95. That is on a worst case scenario. Still, I will hold off. I will buy when it starts to go back up. There is no hurry. CS could go all the way down to $0.50 before it goes back up. If it happens, you could buy 4 times the number of shares today. Then, I can get extra greedy.
When it comes to banks... I've seen a lot of people impale themselves on what they thought were blue-chips so nothing could go wrong buying the dip, even when during a financial crisis... It wasn't just Lehman Bros. I've watched from Enron to Bear Stearns. Enron though, always will stick out in my mind... as it was the darling of Wall Street, yet it also was the only financial institution that couldn't produce a balance-sheet.
Kinda thought so. KRE was more of a panic sell off. Went much lower than the Dec lows. Thur to Mon drop was 25%ish and XLF was 10%ish. Waited to see where it might go. Tight stop just below mondays low. Good thing I didn't play XLF; I would have been stopped out.
I'd be short KRE here. I made a decent return buying into distressed stocks (Bot on Mon, Sold on Tues), but think there's room to fall as @gwb-trading mentioned. This distress in the financial system is concurrent to tightening lending standards (SLOOS) which points to an upcoming decline in consumption (retail sales, consumer expenditures, etc.).
I agree that banks are a challenging arena, starting in the mid-90s when I was a very active day trader I have seen a few crazy things! These days I mostly trade futures, but this looked too good to totally pass up. When I bought Credit Suisse yesterday early AM, I did so as a quick speculation on the premise there would be some kind of emergency announcement later in the day due to its systematic importance, "too big to fail." There was one, rather low key, but it helped. I picked up some shares at 1.87 with the ADR, the present bid is 2.32 so I am up about 24%. It will be a price-action judgement call later today whether to ride it a bit further or exit for a favorable return trip later on.