The main goal of this research was to evaluate the strategic positioning of the institutions operating in the brazilian financial sector, specially in the banking segment, in the year of 2006 and identify how it relates with the performance. To achieve this objective it was used the typology of generic strategies proposed by Michael Porter (1980, 1985). It was used financial and operating variables for the 50 major brazilian banks in activity in 2006 (responsible for 85% of the assets in the industry in that year) to construct the statistical model based on cluster analysis and multivariate analysis. It was possible to conclude that the generic strategy of Focusing on Low Cost had the best performance in that year. In contrast what was expected by the theory, the banks Stuck in the Middle didn`t have the worst, but the second worse performance. The worst generic strategy in terms of performance was the Low Cost strategy.