Wednesday, August 4, 2010

HSBC's Earnings Mystery

Global banking giant HSBC (NYSE:HBC) is not going to win any points this time around for presenting clean and intelligible earnings. I am not suggesting that the company is hiding anything or attempting to mislead investors, but investors are certainly to be forgiven if they came away from Monday's report not really sure exactly how the company is doing.

At the most basic level, things are getting better for HSBC, but the pace of the "real" recovery (as opposed to the accounting recovery) is still rather slow.


The First Half That Was
HSBC reported first half results that were certainly good enough to get cheers from the financial press and institutional investors. On first blush, that makes a certain amount of sense. The bank reported that loan losses were down about 40%, helped by a sizable drop in provisions in the North American business. Impaired loans continued to decline as a percentage of the total, and the company managed to leave the first half of the year with a return on equity of over 10%. (To learn more, check out Return On Equity from Investopedia Video.) 

Well ... not exactly.


The complete piece can be read at:
http://stocks.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2010/HSBCs-Earnings-Mystery-HBC-C-BAC-BCS-RBS-DB0804.aspx

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