2026 Bank Outlook & Victaurs Bank Dash

Some idea lists in a suddenly hot sector, why the consensus outlook will be wrong, and the Victaurs Bank Dash

Jamie Dimon made $770 million this past year. Not long after, Trump said he’d cap credit card rates at 10%. That’s not something you can do by executive order, but it makes for a good sound bite and it fits the moment. JPM stock has been strong, which no one finds surprising. What has bothered people more is that Citibank has once again outperformed nearly every other publicly traded bank. The “never Citi” crowd is not pleased. I am.

Their skepticism is earned. This is the same Citi whose CEO, Chuck Prince, said you had to keep dancing while the music was playing, right as the firm was loading itself with toxic assets. What followed was a collapse from over $500 on a split-adjusted basis to a bailout and a long stretch in the $20s. That kind of failure leaves a mark. People don’t forget it, and markets rarely forgive it quickly.

I know banks better than most, not because I set out to, but because that’s what happens when you spend enough time inside their balance sheets. Banks are strange institutions. They’re usually dull, sometimes dangerous, and almost always misunderstood. They’re mega levered by design, permanently judged on credit, and dragged into the headlines whenever someone wants to talk about risk or failure, even as they remain central to how the economy actually functions.

I ended up in this space by accident. I stayed because it made sense to.

And if you’re a paid member, read on for all the bank ideas you could ever ask for plus access to the dashboard with all 200+ public names, sorted and filtered by the 4-5 metrics that I care about when picking the right banks.