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Johnny Allison Plays Market for Gains After Brexit ‘Bank Sale’

2 min read

Johnny Allison, the Home BancShares Inc. chairman for whom the word “colorful” was invented, loves the banking game. And it is a game to him, he said in an interview last week, albeit a serious one.

If he weren’t occupied with maintaining fiscal discipline at HBI — his primary role now that he’s not CEO — he’d still want to keep his hand in the banking business.

“If I retired tomorrow, I would consider a bank fund. I would consider having a fund that invested in banks,” he said in an interview for an upcoming feature in Arkansas Business.

And he thinks he could do well with it since he knows a lot about bank stocks all over the country.

The U.K.’s June 23 vote to leave the European Union, which sent a brief shockwave through the U.S. stock market, presented him with an opportunity to do some bank investing.

“I couldn’t buy my own bank stock” — Home BancShares was in a quiet period before its earnings release last Thursday — “so I just bought Simmons,” Allison said. “I mean, they beat up Simmons too. But there’s no reason to beat up Simmons; there’s no reason to beat up [Bank of the] Ozarks; there’s no reason to beat us up.”

And he predicted that the market would figure that out too.

Allison bought “only” a half-million dollars’ worth of Simmons First National Corp. stock when it was “on sale” — it bottomed out at $42.54 on the Monday after the surprise results of the “Brexit” vote became clear on June 24. By July 12, it had bounced above its pre-Brexit level, briefly topping $49.

Allison hadn’t taken his profits. “I’m not a trader,” he said. He just added the new shares to the holding he already had from Simmons’ acquisition of Delta Bank & Trust, where Allison was a minority stockholder. “It’s a good bank,” he said.

“My point is, how many times do they put Bank of the Ozarks, Home BancShares and Simmons on sale? We were on sale!”

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