Shares of First BanCorp surged 7.5% Wednesday, a day after the San Juan, Puerto Rico, company said it completed its earnings restatement.
The company finished restating earnings from 2000 to 2004 after running into accounting problems last year related to loan purchases from two other San Juan banking companies, Doral Financial Corp. and R&G Financial Corp.
First BanCorp said that its 2004 net income was $1.5 million, or 0.9%, lower than it had initially reported, and that its retained earnings for the restatement period were lower by $17.1 million, or 3.4%.
It has yet to report earnings for last year or the first and second quarters of this year.
Doral rose 0.9%, while R&G gained 1.2%.
The American Banker index of 225 bank stocks rose 0.34%, but the thrift index dropped 0.1%, despite some better-than-expected housing data. The Standard & Poor's 500 climbed 0.02%. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.17%.
The Census Bureau said Wednesday that 1.05 million new homes were sold last month. The sales declined from July but beat the average analyst estimate by 10,000, according to Briefing.com.
Some companies gained on the news. Corus Bankshares Inc., a large Chicago lender to condo construction, increased 3.3%.
The data also helped two California home lenders. Fremont General Corp. of Santa Monica rose 4.3%, and Downey Financial Corp. of Newport Beach gained 3%.
First Marblehead Corp. hit a 52-week high of $71.50 during Wednesday's trading session. The Boston education loan company said late Tuesday that it would collect $173 million of fees from a bond securitization this week. It had revised the fee figure to about $175 million, from $100 million, on Sept. 14, because the securitization was larger than it had expected.
For the day, First Marblehead's shares rose 4.5%, to close at $68.98.
Capital Corp. of the West fell 2.2%. Joe Morford, an analyst at Royal Bank of Canada's RBC Capital Markets, downgraded the Merced, Calif., company's stock to "underperform," from "sector perform." Capital Corp. announced last week that it expected to report earnings of 47 to 50 cents a share for this quarter. Analysts were expecting earnings of 55 cents, according to Thomson Financial.
Santander Bancorp fell 3.4% after Avi Barak, a Sandler O'Neill & Partners LP analyst, lowered his price target for the San Juan company. He wrote in a research note that he expects Santander to suffer more net interest margin compression and a higher loan-loss provision, which would limit earnings growth.
Other decliners included Countrywide Financial Corp. of Calabasas, Calif., which fell 3.1%, and New Century Financial Corp. of Irvine, which fell 1.8%.
