by Daniel Shvartsman
Capital One Financial (NYSE:COF) sold off on Wednesday despite a positive earnings report after the close Tuesday, as sector concerns sparked by Visa’s earnings report and perhaps the opportunity to take profit held sway.
COF’s reported earnings of $6.78/share and revenue of $7.8B, both comfortably beating estimates, with revenue up 6% year over year. The earnings growth was 34%, but came mostly from a net benefit of $342 from credit provisions as a release of loan reserves of $770M offset net charge-offs of $426M, a sign that consumers’ balance sheets remain strong.
Marketing expense grew 165% from the year-ago quarter and 50% from the two years-ago quarter, a sign of the company’s “leaning further in the marketing to drive growth and to build our franchise,” as CEO Richard Fairbank said on the company’s earnings call.
Average loans increased 3% quarter over quarter to $253.1B, while net interest margin increased 46 basis points over the quarter to 6.35%. The company separately announced that net charge-off rate was 1.09% in September, down from 1.54% in August, with 30-day delinquencies at 1.93%, up from 1.79% in August.
COF shares are up 55% year to date and 108% over the past twelve months even amidst the sell-off, a sign of how strong the recovery has been for U.S. consumer spending as well as how much the market has priced into the recovery, and how hard it is to sort out what are one-off effects from the pandemic and recovery environment and what will last.
Capital One trades at 5.7x trailing earnings, a noisy number given how much of earnings is due to loan reserve releases and an example of this market confusion.