Ted Allrich is the founder of The Online Investor and author of the just released book: Comfort Zone Investing: Build Wealth And Sleep Well At Night. In this weekly column, he'll offer advice to investors who are just getting started.

Financial stocks is a wide net to throw over many industries: credit cards, insurance, mutual funds, banks, savings and loans, stock brokers, mortgage bankers. They all do something a little different but are tied together by one element: money. They use yours to make a profit. There's one other common trait at the moment: sub-prime mortgages. They've hit everyone of these industries, creating havoc and opportunity for investors.

It may be a good time to start buying a few of these downtrodden stocks. The reason: the sub-prime mortgage mess will be over at some point. However, no one knows that point. Merrill Lynch took a write down of more than $8 billion when two weeks before management said it would be closer to $5 billion. Other brokerage firms had similar problems. Banks and insurance companies around the world are getting out of mortgage investments because of their sub-prime losses. There will definitely be more fall out.

But when all the write downs are taken, many good companies will recover and be profitable. An example may be Countrywide Financial Corp. (NYSE: CFC). It announced a loss of $2.85 a share for the quarter but also said it would be profitable again in the fourth quarter. Evidently there is some investor hesitancy to believe this because the stock rallied the day of the news but then started to trade down the next two days. But if management is correct, here is a stock that is trading at 72% of book value (according to AOL personal finance) as I write this.

When you can buy a stock at less than book value, it sometimes represents a bargain. Benjamin Graham liked to buy stocks that were selling at 50% of book value. It's like buying dollars for 50 cents. Most stocks sell well above book value, often carrying a multiple of book. Some tech stocks go for 9 or 10 times book value. But why would a stock sell for less than it's "worth"?

Because investors believe book value will continue to erode, that more losses are coming, that today's book value will only diminish. They don't believe the worst is over. In this specific case, they think there are more problems to come for Countrywide, that more than just sub-prime loans are a problem. And they could very well be right.

But as investors, you need to look at stocks that are selling below book value and see if it makes sense to own some of them. If you can buy a stock that sells for 70 cents on the dollar, if it only gets back to book value, it will return you more than 40% on your investment. And with Countrywide, there's a dividend to help boost the return.

Another stock selling very near book value is Washington Mutual (NYSE: WM). It usually sells well above book. Book value for the Washington based giant is $27.21. As of this writing, it's trading at $27.86, a little bit over book. It has a dividend of $2.24 a year or an 8% yield. They have sub-prime loans. They took a loss in their most recent quarter. Is their pain deeper than already reported?

No one knows the answers to the questions for these two stocks or the many others in the financial services sector. Only time will show us what's really happening to these companies. But some investors will want to start doing research now and perhaps find comfort in the numbers that suggest some of these stocks are victims of emotional reactions.

A few investors will make a lot of money in the financial services sector over the next several years. But only the ones that get the timing right. There might be many more bombs waiting to explode at banks, mortgage bankers, brokers and all the other financial companies. But the Fed is watching very closely and won't allow faith in financial institutions to be damaged. It won't let the largest ones fail. It can't. The big dominoes will knock all the little ones out if they fall.