Covestor model manager Mitch Jones is an accomplished software engineer who has always had an interest in the financial markets. He believes data analysis is a key to investing and can be harnessed for financial gain.
He has been involved in the stock market ever since he opened his own account in high school to invest his summer job earnings. In college, he traded stocks in between classes, and he was fascinated by all the information available online. He began writing computer programs in college to analyze stock data for correlations between data and price movements.
Jones manages Covestor’s Price Momentum model, which is a quantitative portfolio focused on short-term momentum of small cap stocks. He recently added Allied Irish Banks (NYSE: AIB) to the portfolio, which has had an improving net deposit position:
The net deposit position of Allied Irish Banks and Bank of Ireland (NYSE: IRE) — the country’s so-called “pillar banks” — has improved significantly since last week’s bank recapitalisation announcement, Ireland’s finance minister said on Wednesday.
Irish banks have been hemorrhaging deposits as Ireland’s banking crisis continued to rumble and there was an underlying decline of almost 1.8 billion euros ($2.5 billion) in Irish private sector deposits last month.
“The total amount of deposits withdrawn from the pillar banks has been very significantly reduced. Since Thursday’s announcements, the net deposit position of the pillar banks has improved significantly,” Michael Noonan told parliament.
AIB also recently announced that it would not be transferring poorly performing loans to a “bad bank”:
Allied Irish Banks and Bank of Ireland will not transfer some 12 billion euros ($17 billion) worth of loans to the country’s “bad bank” as agreed under an EU/IMF deal, a finance department spokeswoman said on Tuesday. Under an 85 billion euro bailout agreed late last year, Ireland had agreed to extend its purge of risky commercial property loans from lenders to include land and development loans valued at under 20 million euros from its two main banks.
The banks will instead run the loans, with a book value of 12 billion euros, down themselves as part of a huge sector-wide deleveraging process announced last week aimed at trimming lenders down to size and easing them off emergency ECB funding.
“The sub 20 million euro land and development loans in both Bank of Ireland and AIB that had previously been signaled to transfer to NAMA have been identified by the central bank as non-core assets,” the spokeswoman said.
Sources:
“Main Irish banks’ deposit position improving – Fin Min” Reuters, 4/6. https://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/06/ireland-banks-idUSWLA742920110406
“AIB, BoI won’t move smaller loans to NAMA” Reuters, 4/5. https://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/05/ireland-nama-idUSLDE7340OH20110405
