The Smart Money's Bank Playbook For The Next 18 Months

Full analysis of the top 190 U.S. banks using ROTCE, TBVPS, EPS growth, and AI insights. Names to buy, fade, and watch through 2026.

I grew up learning banks. Not because they were easy, but because they were everywhere, and understanding them meant understanding how the financial system actually moves. Banks are strange businesses. Really strange. To outsiders, they look like commodity lenders. To insiders, they are fragile leverage engines with embedded option value. They are confusing, often opaque, and frequently misunderstood. They rely on metrics no other industry touches, NIM, efficiency ratio, ALL, NCO, and their earnings rise and fall with the tides of interest rates. Much like stablecoins, but with FDIC stickers and congressional oversight.

But if you can read through the complexity and tune out the panic cycles, banks become exceptional long-term investments. Especially when the crowd writes them off.

Most generalist investors don’t really understand how banks work. They understand equity narratives, not balance sheet dynamics. They see headlines, not franchise value. They hear “NIM compression” and assume earnings collapse. What they miss is that banks are compounding machines. They are built on leverage, funding discipline, and the operating rhythm of the U.S. economy. And the best long-term performance comes from two places. One, buying them when everyone else thinks the world is ending. Two, holding onto the strong ones that compound quietly, year after year, growing book, lifting returns, and staying out of the news.

So behind the paywall, I’m sharing my custom screen across the top 200 banks. You’ll get the full breakdown on EPS and TBVPS CAGR, ROTCE versus P/TBV, and forward P/E compared to forward earnings growth. I’ve included a ranked list of names I want to own, the ones I’m avoiding, and a few that might surprise you. I also had my AI bank analyst run its own rankings using the same dashboard. The results were better than expected. At this point, I may be putting myself out of a job.

If you want the sheet and you’re a paid subscriber all you have to do is DM me.