Tom Brown makes the case for the bottom in banks, listing eleven reasons why he thinks the bank bear market is over. Among them:

1) Data in the monthly mortgage services reports continues to get better.
2) Earnings reports from non-bank financials should be encouraging.
3) Oil prices could continue to decline.

Count them: not the ubiquitous three bullet points or five or even ten – but eleven! Surely, he could have dropped one of them to give us a nice round number — especially #3 which kind of feels like it was added at the last moment. Still, Tom is definitely a guy worth paying attention to. He was the top-ranked bank analyst on Wall Street during the 1990’s and runs a financials hedge fund right now. While his postings have had a “things are not as bad as you think” tone over the last year, in the last week he’s become more prolific and bolder on his market call. Whether he’s right or not, a lot of people have been drawing a line in the sand for July 15 and bloggers are taking notice.