The threat from a looming wave of maturing commercial real estate loans has been well telegraphed to investors, but it's possible the metrics they are using to protect themselves from risk are flawed. Many investors have been avoiding bank stocks with high concentrations of commercial real estate exposure. However, that metric may miss banks that have riskier loans on their books despite having lower concentrations of CRE.
mountain NBT Bancorp shares year to date. Breese sees NBT as both a defensive and offensive play as it has strong funding and a low CRE concentration of 203%. It also has a compelling opportunity ahead as an upstate New York bank located in an area that is seeing a lot of investment in semiconductor manufacturing from companies such as Micron Technology . UBS' Najarian said the bank scanned stocks that were both sensitive to interest rates and had the most CRE exposure and Providence, R.I.