Hampton Roads Bankshares: Strong Value in the Horrific World of Commercial Banks

Over the past few months, the market has climbed upwards relatively quickly, which has eliminated a lot of the deep bargains available. There are still some great deals out there and I’ve been fortunate enough to discover a few, but it’s become much more difficult to find stocks with the highly favorable risk-reward balances we saw earlier this year.

One sector where I believe huge opportunities have opened up is small commercial banks. These are not the Banks of America (BAC), the Citigroups (C), or even large regional players like SunTrust (STI) and Regions Financial (RF). Rather, these are often community banks or small regional banks that may operate in a few metropolitan areas.