Banco Bpm, is the party here? After the tribulations not only on the stock market in recent months, the third largest Italian bank, born from the first aggregation after the reform of the Popolari, is taking a sensational revenge that has already made it the biggest novelty of the first days of 2017 of Piazza Affari: a boom debut with an increase of 9% yesterday and replication today with an exploit that reaches 7%.
But what is behind the Banco Bpm race that is crowning Giuseppe Castagna as one of the best bankers of the new generation? Certainly there are technical reasons that lead many funds and many managers, who were underweight, to buy the stock in order not to remain uncovered, but the real reasons are mainly two others.
The first and most important reason behind the share boom is the rush to purchases in view of the formation of a hard core, i.e. a nucleus of stable and long-term shareholders who will shelter the new bank from surprises and mitigate them contestability. It is no coincidence that trading on the Stock Exchange has become dizzying and that today more than 5% of the capital has changed hands.
The second reason for the success is Castagna's intention to attack the mountain of non-performing loans (Npl), inherited above all from Banco Popolare, which attracts the keen attention of the ECB's supervisory authorities: Castagna plans to sell 640 million euros suffering and the Stock Exchange likes this very much.
