Regional bank stocks manage to rally ahead of Friday's closing bell

The Yahoo Finance Live team discusses the performance of regional bank stocks after JPMorgan upgrades three to Buy amid the ongoing bank crisis.

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: I mentioned the chaotic week for regional banks. Let's talk about exactly what played out because as we close out the week, we're actually looking at a relatively strong performance today, bouncing off the lowest levels that we have seen in quite some time-- for some of these banks, the lowest levels on record.

PacWest, at least for today, you can see a rally on our hands as well as Western Alliance. Now, this move to the upside, Akiko, today coming from the bullish call-- or a lot of it being generated from the bullish call that we got from JPMorgan, upgrading a couple of those stocks that had been under substantial amount of pressure-- Western Alliance, Comerica, Zions all upgraded to overweight. And the argument that that analyst is making is that these bank stocks appear substantially mispriced to them.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, I mean, that's probably putting it mildly. We had a guest on from KBW earlier who said, look if you ignored the headlines and you looked at the balance sheet of these banks, these moves just don't make sense. And that's what's been really interesting to watch this week as we've seen some of these regional banks coming under pressure.

Number one, so many of those just kind of being clumped together, even though they have very different operating models-- but some would argue they were also squeezed by short sellers. So something to be watching here as we look to try to see if we have calmer waters next week when it comes to the financials.