Zions stock rises 50 percent

(Salt Lake Tribune) Zions Bancorp's stock is up more than 50 percent this year as more analysts become convinced the bank doesn't need as much new capital as they had thought.

"It was my No. 1 pick coming into the year, so it didn't surprise me at all. But it happened a little quicker than I anticipated," Marty Mosby, a bank analyst at FTN Equity Capital Markets Corp., said Thursday

"Zions was one of the [most]-shorted bank stocks in the market. The cause of that was, there was a real dichotomy in the understanding of where the company was going to go in 2010," Mosby said.

One camp believed the Salt Lake City-based bank holding company needed more than $1 billion in additional capital to offset problems caused largely by the commercial real estate collapse and the recession. That view had gained a lot of traction.

Another camp, which included Zions executives, said, the bank's capital needs weren't so dire. At most, Zions might need $500 million, and probably less, some analysts believed.

Original Article