Merrill Lynch (NYSE: MER)
Merrill Lynch had a lot of news come out today. I’m not surprised by the amount of it. When you think about it, the financials have been in the forefront of the media for the last twelve months and I believe that it will continue for sometime. From the hell that Freddie and Fannie have been been going through to Indymac being seized by the feds, who knows what news will be next.
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It was announced that Merrill Lynch has reached a settlement with Massachusetts securities regulators. They will be buying back all illiquid auction-rate securities from it’s retail customers with less $3 million in their accounts on record on October 15th.
This agreement will help speed up the timetable for the retail investors to get their money back. This comes two weeks after Merrill Lynch has agreed to voluntarily buy back $12 billion worth of securities from investors beginning Jan. 15th The regulators also reiterated that Merrill would have to buy back securities from retail investors with $100 or less in deposits starting in January
Of course this news came out just hours after Andrew Cuomo stated in a TV interview that he will take the brokerage (ironic that it’s called that) firm to court because of their refusal to settle it’s own investigation.
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The last bit of news that came out is in regards to that Merrill has recruited Citigroup’s lead mortgage trader Jim De Mare. It’s the second mortgage trader that they’ve picked up in the last few weeks. The other is a veteran from Bear Sterns by the name of Mike Nierenberg who also worked at JP Morgan briefly.
It seems that Merrill Lynch is re-building it’s trading business with it’s new leader Tom Montag, a man who was a long time executive at Goldman Sachs.
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I stated before that I stay away from the financial sector for the most part. I can count on one hand how many times that I’ve invested in any financial stocks in the last five years. I’ve been looking at them for the last month or so and I know that these stocks that I’ve mentioned in this post will come back. The sector has taken a beaten and will be for some time, but I will get in on these when I feel the time is right. It’s just not right now.
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