TARPedBanks (< 20)

Considering a Change to TARPedBanks setup

June 03, 2010 – Comments (1)

With no new picks expected from the TARP Capital Purchase Program, I'm thinking of making a shift in the active pick criteria for TARPedBanks.

As many know, this player was set up in Nov '08 to track the performance of banks that took TARP funding.  I attempted green thumbing every ratable bank that took TARP money.  When banks have repurchased their TARP preferred stock, picks have been closed.  The performance of those banks as a group was fair for the first couple of months, then had was has to be one of the fastest dives to Bottom Fool ever experienced in CAPS in early '09 and has been bouncing around with 0.0x ratings ever since.

The player score has pulled up a bit, current rating is .02, ranked 70488 out of 70559.

My thought is to swap the closed and active picks to see if the banks that have repaid TARP can pull the score up from the bottom of the barrel or resume the dive to last place.  One issue I know I'll have with that is many of the closed picks no longer meet CAPS rating criteria, but there should be plenty that are ratable.

I appreciate all the folks that comment on the blogs or follow TARPed here on CAPS and wanted to toss the idea out before making the change.  I could always set up a third player, but I have enough trouble keeping up with this one and my primary account.  Besides, since this is already near the bottom of the pack, I think switching to having the banks that were strong enough to get out from under TARP as the active picks would make for an interesting - if somewhat useless - experiment.

Thoughts and comments are welcome.

Fool On!

Russ (akd rd80)