Small-cap stocks — left behind by the 2023 U.S. stock-market rally led by technology stocks — are poised to play catch-up in the second half, shaking off worries about a regional banking crisis that threatened to rattle financial markets earlier this year.
The small-cap benchmark Russell 2000 RUT was up 5.7% in the year to date through Tuesday’s close versus a 14% gain for the S&P 500 index SPX and a nearly 30% rally for the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite COMP . Outsize gains for around seven large capitalization tech stocks have accounted for most of the rally for the large-cap indexes, leaving most stocks behind. An equal weight measure of the S&P 500 was up just 3.2% for the year through Wednesday.
The KRE ETF sports a price-to-book ratio of 0.84 and a dividend yield of 7.77%, said Sandy Villere, portfolio manager at Villere & Co. in New Orleans. And its price-to-earnings ratio stands at 7.4 times, versus around 19 for the S&P 500. For the broader market and economy, the regional bank troubles so far haven’t delivered the bite that many feared back in March. The collapse of SVB brought predictions of an imminent credit crunch that would accelerate the U.S. economy’s slide into recession.
As the March bank woes fade into the rearview mirror, “the better likelihood banks will be able to take advantage of the interest-rate environment,” he said, arguing that problems in the industry were concentrated in a handful of “very specialized cases.”