Citigroup Shares in Rally Mode

Citigroup shares surged Tuesday, suggesting the troubled institution's stock may have turned a corner.

The move comes on the one-year anniversary of the S&P 500 index scraping its low of the financial crisis. Through last week, Citigroup had rallied more than 250% since famously breaking below a buck intra-day action in March of last year. It rallied along with the other big banks over the past 12 months as the economy stabilized.
Citigroup shares were recently quoted at $3.78, up 22 cents, or 6%. Their high for the session is $3.86. More than 988 million shares have changed hands, well beyond the issue's three-month trailing daily average of 524 million shares. As usual, the stock was sitting atop the most active list for the New York Stock Exchange with its volume more than six times more than its closest competition, Bank of America, which had volume of 146 million in late afternoon trades.

The stock hasn't seen these heights since early December, just prior to the emergence of speculation that the company was readying a deal to repay TARP funds. News that eventually came to pass on Dec. 14.

Bullish comments from several different sources stoked the trading action on Tuesday. Legendary investor Bruce Berkowitz said in an interview with Fortune that the worst is over for Citigroup and that shares look cheap these days. Also, fixed income analysts at CreditSights also made positive comments regarding Citigroup's businesses.

Berkowitz, who recently added $700 million worth of Citigroup shares to his Fairholme Fund portfolio, said he believes Citigroup's balance sheet is slowly improving and that even some of the more troubled assets now return more than 5%.
"People are so focused on the liabilities that they've potentially forgotten about some of the assets," Berkowitz told Fortune.

"The price is right," he also said. "It's just a question of when it becomes obvious to everyone that the worst is over."

Another factor driving the buying may be a reported strong reception for the company's offering of $2 billion in trust preferred securities. Dow Jones is reporting the securities are seeing "much demand" from both institutional and retail investors.

Citigroup shares astonishingly broke the buck last year following the steep slide of the markets at large. The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank to its crisis-low of 6,547 a year ago today as well. Citigroup shares first fell below $1 during intra-day trading on March 5, 2009, and then again slipped below $1 a share on March 9, during regular trading hours.

Citigroup's financial supermarket model was sorely tested during the financial crisis as toxic securities and soured mortgages and credit card loans wreaked havoc on the company's capital position. The U.S. government ended up injecting $45 billion worth of fresh capital into Citigroup.

After much shareholder unrest and government browbeating, Citigroup now seems to be making some headway in its massive turnaround, which has included splitting the bank up into a good bank/bad bank structure and selling off unwanted assets as well as huge turnover at the management and board levels.

After posting losses for the past two years, analysts, on average, expect Citigroup to finally break even in the current first quarter, and post a small profit for the whole of fiscal 2010, according to Thomson Reuters.
Shares of the other big banks -- Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo -- were all also trading higher on Tuesday.