Hancock Whitney Outperforming On Solid Execution And A Great Balance Sheet

I expected good things from Hancock Whitney (NASDAQ:HWC) in my last update on this Gulf Coast bank, and I haven’t been disappointed. While deposit outflows have been a little worse than I expected, deposit and loan betas have been quite strong and the company continues to execute well on costs. With that, the shares have outperformed since that last article, outperforming regional banks by more than 7% and bringing the year-to-date outperformance up to around 12%.

The only real negative I can’t point to here, apart from a deteriorating macro environment, is the valuation. Hancock Whitney has been doing well, but not well enough to drive substantial upside revisions to my numbers, and so the outperformance is chewing into some of the undervaluation I saw before. I’d rather own a more expensive high-quality bank than a cheaper low-quality bank, but investors probably shouldn’t expect much beyond a high single-digit to low double-digit return over the next year.

 

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Hancock Whitney Outperforming On Solid Execution And A Great Balance Sheet