There is nothing I love more than the "max" function in Google, when checking a stock quote.
This morning I happened to hit max on the chart of Barclays (BCS) stock. I then randomly chose a date in 1994, which was the year I left Lehman Brothers, which was eventually purchased by Barclays. Google showed me a price of $8.85 for BCS on Nov. 8, 1994, which wasn't the exact date Left Lehman for Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, but was within the ballpark. On that date, BCS finished trading at $8.85 a share. Yesterday? After 28.5 years? $8.45.
That is an extraordinary, perhaps unparalleled example of value destruction. Obviously Barclays existed for more than century before it bought Lehman, and it is one of the "High Street" banks in the U.K. Those are so named because they tend to have branches on the high street, which is the colloquial name for the main thoroughfare in a British town or neighborhood.
In 2007, BCS shares were flirting with $60. To say that Barclays, as a corporate entity, has never recovered from the Crash of 2008 would be the understatement of the century. Or at least of the past 15 years.
But anyone can read a chart, and looking at charts of UBS (UBS) , Deutsche Bank (DB) or other European competitors is actually worse, and even U.S.-based stocks like Morgan Stanley (MS) have never reattained their 2001 highs more than two decades later. So, don't buy second-tier investment bank stocks at all, but certainly do not buy them in a rising interest rate environment.
Portfolio management aside, though, what drew my attention to BCS this morning was an article in ZeroHedge noting Barclays' pledge to stop funding oil sands projects and to shift away from funding thermal coal projects, as well. Ah, yes. "ESG." My three favorite letters. It's not enough that your stock has been an absolute disaster for three decades, let's make it worse by attempting to appease the "woke" crowd and stop lending to hydrocarbon-exploiting companies.
To be fair, Barclays stopped short of a full ban on lending to hydrocarbon projects, but that wasn't enough for some, apparently. The ZeroHedge article contained this nugget:
Commenting on Barclays' new targets, Jeanne Martin, Head of Banking Programme at ShareAction, said in a statement, "Disappointingly, despite not having published a new oil and gas policy for the last three years, the bank's fracking policy remains unchanged and there is no mention of new oil and gas. This means Barclays continues to be out of step with current minimum standards of ambition within the industry."
Fracking? Seriously? The first oil well in the U.S. was hydraulically fractured in 1949. Only the lunatic fringe opposes a well-established, continually-refined technology that they don't even partially understand, but, hey, that's ESG. I am sorry to give a platform to such lunacy, but it shows the entrenched mentality around ESG and why states like Texas, West Virginia and Florida have been pulling money from ESG-obsessed fund complexes like BlackRock (BLK) .
The line in the sand has been drawn. Access to hydrocarbons has a perfect, 1:1 correlation with human development, and has for the past 150 years. If you think you can wave a magic wand to fix that, feel free. And please feel free to debate me in the comments section.
I am restraining myself on discussing Barclay's (and its former CEO here) further here, but I will say that this is Excelsior Capital Partners' mantra: You stop financing hydrocarbon projects and we short your stock. Full stop. Shorts give immediate proceeds, and best believe those proceeds will be reinvested in names from ExCap's HOAX portfolio. Let's see what performs better: BCS or Exxon (XOM) . My money -- and my firm and my professional reputation -- are based on choosing the latter.
