As the Lehman turns
Posted
Dec 14 2007, 06:23 PM
by
Matt Koppenheffer
Lehman Brothers reported its fourth quarter and
full year earnings yesterday. Interestingly, the earnings -- which were pretty darn good considering what's been going on -- didn't get or create nearly the hullabaloo that the massive, stomach churning losses at other Wall Street firms stirred up.
Well allow me to take a moment: nice quarter fellas.
The problem is -- nobody's interested right now in believing that a Wall Street firm is doing something right. It's not hard to blame them -- finance firms seem to be
hitting a wall all at once and the result has been the evaporation of tens of billions of dollars of shareholder value.
On
The Motley Fool's CAPS service, players aren't much more impressed with Lehman than they are with competitors like
Merrill Lynch and
Morgan Stanley. All three carry lousy two star ratings. There's no love lost on
Bear Stearns either, as it has a rock bottom one star rating. Of the major firms,
Goldman Sachs is the only one that CAPS players seem to take any interest in whatsoever, and even that is only considered a middling three star stock.
Is it that bleak for these firms? For the near future it very well could be, though we'll get a few more data points next week when Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bear Stearns report earnings. As The Wall Street Journal
highlighted today [subscription required], Goldman is
expected to report some good numbers thanks to bearish bets on the mortgage market. The other two? Well, maybe not so much.
So be sure to tune in for that action next week, and in the meantime, you can check out what investors have to say about these financial stocks by hopping over to
CAPS.
(Full disclosure: I do not have a financial position in any of the companies mentioned.)
