Credit Agricole SA is a bank which obsesses me – and on which I have lost some loot.
The problem is that it is a bank with very good bits and very bad bits. And the good bits are excellent (and mostly outside Paris) – and the bad bits are atrocious.
Charlie Munger observed that if you mix turds with raisins you still have turds.  Charlie was right and it shows in Credit Agricole SA’s stock price.
The bank is controlled by a bunch of regional mutual banks who – for reasons that are not apparent to me – have never got around to closing the bad bits.  Those regional mutuals are in turn controlled by five million voting mutual certificate holders – a reasonable proportion of French households.
The super-bad bit is their investment bank. It’s a mathematical finance type investment bank in the French mould. As has been noticed by more than a few people – the market recently has not been too kind to mathematical finance.
I just want to extract the results – quarterly – for just investment banking business.  Please click for detail...


These numbers really deserve looking at. The first observation is that revenue can go very strongly negative at an investment bank. That is nothing that Lehman et al have not discovered before – but the trading revenue was negative for several quarters in a row. You might conclude the traders were not much better as traders than say the average French farmer.

The second thing is that the costs line doesn’t seem to move much. Now when I was young and na Yahoo: stock broker Bronte Capital calls for a new French Revolution investment banker
Google: investment banker Bronte Capital calls for a new French Revolution stock broker