Value investor says banks look attractive

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Money manager Jim O'Shaughnessy, who oversees about $11 billion in assets, said on Tuesday that the sell-off in U.S. bank stocks may have run its course.

"I think that financials are now looking attractive again," O'Shaughnessy, who uses a value-tilted quantitative strategy, said at the Reuters Investment Outlook Summit in New York.

He said that with the huge write-offs some banks and other financial companies have taken because of losses in mortgage-related securities, it is now near a point where the bad news is out.

Noting that many financial companies have slashed their dividends, O'Shaughnessy said that might not be a bad thing. He pointed out that back in the 1980s Goodyear Tire cut its dividend amid tough times -- and then saw its stock soar 181 percent.

O'Shaughnessy said he has been buying banking stocks in Australia, one of three countries that have the largest allocation outside of the United States in his global strategy.

The United States gets a 30 percent allocation in the global strategy. Apart from Australia, the other top overseas allocations are to Japan and Germany.

O'Shaughnessy's methodology involves evaluating stocks on the basis of price to sales or price to cash flow.

While he thinks banks are starting to look attractive, O'Shaughnessy had a dim view of home builders.

"My reason there is that it is going to take a while for the existing inventory (of houses) to be sold out," he said.

Asked if home prices, which have already declined sharply, can go lower, he said, "Definitely. This is not a multiyear thing. This is not a short-term deal."

He said the downturn was reminiscent of a housing slump that occurred in New England in the early 1990s.

O'Shaughnessy left Bear Stearns Co Inc BSC.N recently to set up his own firm, O'Shaughnessy Asset Management LLC, in Stamford, Connecticut.

He has described the departure, which came at a time when some Bear Stearns hedge funds were having huge losses, as amicable.

At the Reuters Summit, he declined to discuss Bear Stearns, other than to say it has been a well-run company that "ran into the side of a wall" with subprime mortgage problems that were little different from those at other banks.

(Reporting by Cal Mankowski; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Leslie Adler)