Schwab Can’t Catch a Break as SVB, Block Trade Weigh on Shares

(Bloomberg) — The worst two-day stretch since 2016 for Charles Schwab Corp. looks like a case of bad timing for the buyers behind a large block trade in the brokerage.

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Schwab is down 17% since a person familiar with the matter said JPMorgan was managing a block trade worth about $650 million on Thursday before the market opened. Analysts are calling the selloff overdone after the deal traded into an awful session for financials stocks, sparked by SVB Financial Group taking a loss on its securities portfolio and seeking to raise $2.25 billion.

But analysts say Schwab has taken more than its fair share of the losses, falling third-most in the 67-member S&P 500 Financials Index on Thursday. Only SVB and First Republic Bank were down by more. Schwab extended losses by 5.5% on Friday, making it the third biggest weight on the broader S&P 500 after Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Investors are “stretching” for read-throughs from the SVB liquidation, but the parallels to Schwab are only skin-deep, UBS analyst Brennan Hawken wrote in a note Friday.

“While SCHW does have a relatively long-dated securities portfolio and declining deposit balances, the similarities, in our view, end there,” Hawken wrote.

Others on Wall Street joined in defending Schwab. Piper Sandler analyst Richard Repetto wrote on Friday that Schwab’s remaining retail deposit risk is “far different” from SVB, calling current levels a buying opportunity for investors.

Read more: Why SVB Was Hit By a Bank Run and Where It Could Lead

(Updates to add Schwab weighing on the S&P 500 in the third paragraph. A previous version was corrected to remove a reference to a stock placement in the third paragraph.)

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