Will Lloyds Bank shares gallop ahead?
Independent analyst Alistair Strang considers prospects for a popular bank among retail investors.
17th August 2026 09:38
by Alistair Strang from Trends and Targets
A stop loss of just 108p should satisfy our rules for the future! We don’t ever kick off an analysis with such ridiculous statements but Lloyds share price makes it very difficult to avoid exuding some optimism for the longer term, although to be fair, our stricter rules demand the price actually closes below 108p.
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The bank’s fairly recent earnings report tends to confirm our thoughts, their profits up a “meagre” 23% year on year and the return on tangible equity up by 17.1%.
Until now, Lloyds share price seems to have avoided optimism, managing an increase of roughly 15% since the start of this year. We would have anticipated that the rumours about “record-breaking” financials, along with the prior lessons from other international banks, would be exerting greater positive pressure on the share price but the opposite feels like it’s true.
The “high regard” in which the UK retail banks are held looks like it remains in place among investors, although we do suspect the UK bank will eventually follow the trajectory of international banks.
Continuing on from our opening statement, the immediate situation calculates with the potential of movement above 117.5p apparently capable of a visit to an initial 122p with our longer-term secondary, if exceeded, at a distant-sounding 137p. These ambitions make some sense, when we look abroad at US and European financial sector behaviour.
Should things intend to go wrong, below 113p looks capable of ticking the first box for some trouble, suggesting the potential of weakness coming to an initial 105p with our secondary, if broken, at 100p. These target levels risk becoming a problem as closure below 108p would become a distinct possibility. This would also muddy the waters, ruining our calculations for the long term.
For now, it’s officially fingers crossed time!
Source: Trends and Targets. Past performance is not a guide to future performance.
Alistair Strang has led high-profile and "top secret" software projects since the late 1970s and won the original John Logie Baird Award for inventors and innovators. After the financial crash, he wanted to know "how it worked" with a view to mimicking existing trading formulas and predicting what was coming next. His results speak for themselves as he continually refines the methodology.
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