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January 22, 2024
We had a respectable year in 2023, I think, though certainly not in the way we may have anticipated. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index returned 24.2%, far outpacing foreign markets. Bonds had one of their worst years in history and most commodities declined.
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October 23, 2023
Very little has changed in terms of the numbers, the statistical status of the financial world, since we last wrote to you. The stock market is up, but only a few very large names, 7 to be precise, carry the entire S&P 500 Index, while the remaining 493 languish. Interest rates are up, which means bond prices are down, and indeed 2023 has brought with it the worst bear market in bonds ever recorded.
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July 18, 2023
Recession JUST AROUND THE CORNER! Inflation HIGHEST SINCE THE 1980S! Interest rates blasting off like a battery of Ukrainian HIMARS! Ukraine blasted off the face of the earth in the biggest war since 1945! China ready to gobble up Taiwan like a bag of Doritos! In 2024 it’s looking like, gasp, Trump vs. Biden AGAIN!
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April 18, 2023
The performance of the broad averages in the first quarter of 2023 was positive, up 7% for the S&P 500, but it felt like a continuation of the 2022 bear market. The accounts for which we are responsible trailed the averages by a handful of percentage points—we were up low single digits, but nonetheless UP..
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Jan 18, 2023
Two years ago, as I was reporting the year 2020’s results to you, I cited a photo sent to me by my sister comparing 2020 to a decrepit, hopelessly broken-down old car. I suppose the appropriate comparison for 2022 would be a train wreck or the early stages of the Apocalypse…
July 14, 2022
The first half of 2022, alas, was not a particularly happy time for investors. The major U.S. stock market averages turned in their worst first half performance in 52 years, with the S&P 500 declining 21.56% and the NASDQ declining 30.30%. Bonds lost a little over 10%…
April 21, 2022
On a cumulative basis the last three years witnessed spectacular returns for the major indexes and with them Weybosset investors, nearly doubling our money over that period of time. Perhaps then we should not be nonplussed that the first quarter of 2022 went down as one of the worst on record…
January 21, 2022
Happy New Year to you and your loved ones from all of us at Weybosset Research & Management LLC! We wish you a healthy and PROSPEROUS 2022. From the point of view of prosperity, 2021 was not so bad, especially for investors in the U.S. stock market. The S&P 500 Index, our benchmark, was up 26.6% in 2021, 28.41% with reinvested dividends. The accounts for which we are responsible trailed the S&P 500 by a few percentage points—we were up low-to-mid 20s for the year…
October 18, 2021
The pace of ascent of the stock U.S. stock market slowed in the third quarter of 2021, but the ascent persisted, to the benefit of those of us affiliated with Weybosset Research and Management LLC (WRM). On a year-to-date basis, the S&P 500 Index is up 14.7% (15.25% with reinvested dividends). The accounts for which we are responsible, with few exceptions, performed about in line with the broad averages…
July 21, 2021
At the end of June, I underwent back surgery to correct some of the ravages of arthritis in my spine. Recovery is going well—I’m enthusiastic about prospects once I’m back on my feet—but in the meantime, I’m flat on my back in the early stages of healing.
So, my partner Justin has taken the job of writing our customary quarterly letter. Pay attention! He has some good things to say…
April 21, 2021
I am pleased to report—in case you did not notice—that the bull market in stocks continued in the first quarter of 2021 despite the chaos, induced by a global pandemic and the accompanying economic disruption, a summer of rioting in American cities over racial injustice, and an unusually bitter general election, in 2020. Last year was uniquely tough and, the aftermath, unfolding today, fraught with uncertainties. But it was a good time to be invested in U.S. equities….
January 19, 2021
In mid-December of last year, my sister sent me a photograph of what appears to be a suburban parking lot. In it is parked the worst-looking car you’ve ever seen, originally, I suppose, a white subcompact of some sort, but now a dirty lump of twisted, battered panels duct taped together, sheets of translucent plastic where the windows once were, also duct taped…
October 26, 2020
I am most pleased to report the investments which you have entrusted to our management are fine, thriving even. After a jaw-dropping, gut-wrenching plunge in February and March of this year – down more than a third in the space of a few weeks! — the broad market averages staged an equally remarkable rally and are now trading near all-time highs. For year-to-date 2020 through the end of the third quarter…
July 21, 2020
These certainly are interesting times for investors! In the stock market, we endured a sharp, steep bear market in the first quarter of 2020, followed by one of the sharpest, steepest rebounds in history in the second quarter. When the closing bell rang June 30, on a year-to-date basis the S&P 500 was down 4% (-3.1% with reinvested dividends). Not a big change at the net, but…
April 14, 2020
I doubt any of us will soon forget the first quarter of 2020. Financially – and I restrict my comments to financial matters as many have done a better job than I can with the political, economic, and, above all, human dimensions of the times in which we live – after a really good stock market in 2019…
January 24, 2020
I don’t know about you, but I view our investment results for 2019 with a great deal of satisfaction. The S&P 500 put in one of its best years in the last 30 years (only 1995, 1997 and 2013 were better and not by much), up 28.88% (31.49% with reinvested dividends). And I’m pleased to report…
October 30, 2019
U.S. equity markets continued their often-grudging march higher in 2019’s third quarter, achieving all-time highs just after the end of the quarter. The S&P 500 returned 18.74% (20.55% with reinvested dividends) on a year-to-date basis. A good year so far, and just reward for those patient enough to endure the sharp and dismaying drop in the market in the fourth quarter of last year…
July 15, 2019
I am pleased to report highly satisfactory results for our clients in the first half of 2019. (I hope you agree!) U.S. stocks, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, advanced 17.36% (18.55% with reinvested dividends) in the January-June period…
April 15, 2019
The major stock market averages continued their sharp move from the lows of December and marched higher with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index closing up 13.65% for the first quarter 2019. The markets have gone from the worst December on record to…
January 9, 2019
2018, alas, was not a particularly happy year for investors. US stock market averages turned in their worst performance in a decade with the S&P 500 declining 6.24% (-4.4% with reinvested dividends)…
October 19, 2018
It is my practice to write to you after the conclusion of every fiscal quarter to give you an update on our progress on your behalf, commentary on the market and to keep you apprised of our plans…
April 23, 2018
What insight! What prescience the author of those words displays considering what subsequently transpired in financial markets in the first quarter of 2018!…
January 11, 2018
2017 was, for investors, a decidedly Happy Old Year as broad market averages vaulted from record high to record high. The Standard & Poor’s 500 average returned 19.42% for the year…
October 9, 2017
The major stock market averages continued their record-setting march higher in the third quarter of 2017…
July 26, 2017
Another record high indeed! And we, Fellow Investor, are glad to hear the news as we are fully invested in common stocks…
April 28, 2017
The bull market in stocks continued on its merry way the first three months of 2017, with the major averages reaching all-time highs…
January 19, 2017
2016 – what a year! The stock market kicked off with one of the worst Januaries in history, a gut-wrenching plunge reminiscent of the dark days of 2008. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index finally put in a bottom in early February…
October 24, 2016
The third quarter of 2016 was about as placid a quarter in the financial markets as I can recall. This outcome was entirely predictable as I had been warning you for a considerable time that markets are much thinner now…
July 21, 2016
The first half of 2016 in the U.S. equity market repeated what by now has become a familiar pattern: a bout of high volatility and harrowing decline followed by recovery, netting out in the end to not much change at all……
April 19, 2016
This letter marks at least the third time I have written to you in the past year to report that the period under review – a prior quarter, a prior year – was characterized by extraordinary volatility in the stock market, only to end, with respect to the broad averages, right about where it began…
January 21, 2016
Statistically, 2015 looks like a fairly uneventful year. The S&P 500 was down a little bit (-0.73%) or up a little bit (+1.38%) if reinvested dividends are taken into account. But these numbers mask a less sanguine reality. Fully 95% of the S&P 500’s 2015 results were attributable to the ten largest companies in the index…
June 30, 2015
Last April I wrote to you remarking that though there had been much to and fro, much sturm und drang, in the equity markets in the first part of 2015, very little had changed – the S&P 500 was within a hairbreadth of where it began the year. The same is true…
April 21, 2015
Mountains labor mightily and bring forth a ridiculous mouse! The Latin poet Horace’s rendition (in English translation) of an ancient Greek proverb sums up my take on the performance of the stock market in the first quarter of 2015. Volatility increased strikingly…
October 13, 2014
For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven…. This line from Ecclesiastes, written in ancient Israel perhaps 2300 years ago by that most prolific of poets, Anonymous, set to music by Pete Seeger in the 1950s and rendered into a top-40 hit by The Byrds in 1966 comes to mind…
July 29, 2014
Things are getting a little frothy out there! Perusal of the Wall Street Journal article reveals that Cynk Technology is a classic pump-and-dump stock promoted by characters straight out of the recent Martin Scorsese film…
January 30, 2014
2013 was a banner year for the stock market with the S&P 500 putting up its biggest return (32.39%) since the heady days of the second Clinton Administration (1997, to be precise) when the market was roaring and the term “tech bubble” had not yet entered the general vocabulary. One commentator explained the move by saying…
October 30, 2013
Ben Graham (1894-1976), the father of modern security analysis, the father of value investing and mentor to a host of star investors, uttered these words in 1955 before a Senate panel interested in determining whether the bull market in stocks under way at the time might in some way threaten the economic expansion…
July 23, 2013
In prior epistles I remarked that, absent some exogenous shock, it feels as if the stock market “wants” to go up; and that, furthermore, because stock prices ultimately are tied to the fortunes of the underlying businesses, and because the direction of business has generally been up since the end of the Middle Ages…
April 17, 2013
The most important news from the financial markets in the first quarter of 2013 was, of course, the attainment of new record highs by all of the major stock market indices in the United States. I am pleased to report that the portfolios for which we are responsible fully participated in the first quarter move; most did measurably better than the averages…
January 16, 2013
After a basically flat year in 2011, 2012 was quite good for the stock market, with the S&P 500 Index returning 16%, despite widespread doom and gloom in the media. The equity accounts for which we are responsible trailed the S&P 500—our results were in the high-single to low-double digit range…
October 26, 2012
If we were to take the Oracle of Omaha’s advice to heart, we would all be feeling extraordinarily greedy right now. Despite the fact that at the end of the third quarter of this year the S&P 500 closed within less than ten per cent of the all-time high set in October of 2007, and having more than doubled off the bottom set in March 2009…
July 13, 2012
As in 2010 and 2011 the markets turned in strong first quarters, only to be confronted and confounded by the seemingly intractable problems that characterize the era in which we live, the era of global deleveraging. (“Deleveraging” is economist-speak for the process of working off accumulated debt.) The first quarter of this year was the strongest first quarter since …
April 23, 2012
An old Wall Street adage goes something like, the market will do whatever it needs to do to thwart the maximum number of investors. That was certainly the case in the first quarter of 2012. After the stürm und drang, after the intense volatility of 2008-2011, and all the worry around the sovereign debt crises in Europe, the S&P 500 turned in its best first quarter since 1997…
January 12, 2012
James Surowiecki, in his review of last year’s stock market in the January 16, 2012 issue of The New Yorker, neglects to mention that the U.S. market, with all its treachery, was the BEST performing major market in the world in 2011; the MSCI World Index was down more than 8% last year, while all the big European indexes posted declines of more than 20%…
October 13, 2011
In my last two letters I commented on the heavy macro problems confronting the markets—earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown in Japan, a chronically sluggish U.S. economy characterized by seemingly intractable high unemployment, and a financial crisis in Europe that appears all but insoluble—and observed that nevertheless the markets were holding their own…
July 14, 2011
The (justifiably) famous opening words of A Tale of Two Cities pretty well sums up the way I’ve been thinking about the investment environment lately.
Under the rubric “best of times,” falls the condition of publicly-traded U.S. companies in general, and the ones owned by Weybosset Research & Management clients in particular. Business is good…
April 19, 2011
An article in The Wall Street Journal a week or two ago proclaimed that the first quarter of 2011 was “the best first quarter for the stock market since 1997.” This in spite of the fact that the markets were confronted with: 1) a triple disaster in Japan: earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown; 2) revolution, civil war…
January 27, 2011
As I mentioned in my last letter to you, the word that comes to mind when we think about what worked for us last year is, INCOME. The financial disaster of late 2008 and early 2009 wreaked havoc on nearly every asset class, including fixed income securities (non-U.S. Treasury bonds and virtually all preferred stocks), or securities that…
October 7, 2010
In my last letter to you, dated April 23, I noted that, as of that date, the stock market had continued its impressive rebound from the profoundly depressed levels reached in early 2009 (“albeit at a more stately pace”), and that, given reasonable valuations and decent fundamentals, the trend was likely to continue…
April 23, 2010
I’d like to touch base with you on how we at Weybosset Research & Management LLC view the current investment situation, where we see opportunities and where we see dangers. As usual, this quarterly letter is summary in nature, designed to give a broad overview of our outlook. If you want more in the way of specifics, or would like to discuss…