Courtesy of Pam Martens
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rallied 99.97 points yesterday but the mega Wall Street bank, Citigroup, closed in the red, down 0.15 percent. That decline follows a dramatic loss of 5.28 percent on Wednesday, a day that the Dow was down only 3.05 percent.
Citigroup’s closing price yesterday was $61.32. The stock has lost more than 88 percent of its value since 2007, despite its attempt to dress up the share price with a 1-for-10 reverse stock split in 2011, which left its long-term shareholders with 1 share for each 10 shares previously held.
Citi’s share price has also been dropping like a rock since July 24 of this year when it closed at $73.01. But that hasn’t triggered a rethink on the part of its competitor banks on Wall Street who have “Buy” or “Overweight” ratings on Citi’s stock according to MarketBeat.
From September 20, 2018 to the close of trading on Christmas Eve of last year, Citigroup lost a whopping 34 percent of its value. That’s in just a little over three months. Nothing about its situation or the global macroeconomic picture has changed for the better after last year’s rout but, for some reason, four of its big bank peers got very bullish on its stock this year.
As you will see from the MarketBeat data below, on April 16 of this year, UBS reiterated its Buy on Citi and boosted its price target from $78 to $83. Less than three weeks later, Wells Fargo put a very bullish price target of $90 a share on Citi. Less than a month after that, on May 30, Goldman Sachs upgraded its rating on Citi to Buy from Neutral with Goldman analyst Richard Ramsden raising his price target from $71 to $77 a share. Then on July 9, according to MarketBeat, JPMorgan Chase entered the fray by lifting its price target on Citi from $75 to $77.
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