Buy List First-Half Summary
The first half of the year is on the books. Our Buy List managed a small gain of 1.99% compared with the S&P 500’s gain of 6.05%. Including dividends, our Buy List is up 2.70% while the S&P 500 is up 7.14%.
The second quarter was rough for our Buy List. We beat the market in Q1, but during Q2, the Buy List had a small loss of 0.09% while the S&P 500 gained 4.69% (not including dividends). Our “beta” this year is 0.9958.
What’s interesting is that we can see an old lesson with our Buy List this year. The big duds are weighing us down much more than the winners are helping us.
Nine of our 20 stocks are beating the market, and a tenth is very close. Most of our stocks are doing just fine, but it’s the big losers that are causing the most harm. Bed Bath & Beyond is down 28.5% which is more than twice as much as our second biggest loser. All by itself, our BBBY position knocks off 1.6% to our YTD gain.
Here’s our stock-by-stock first-half performance (sans dividends):
Eddy Elfenbein is a Washington, DC-based speaker, portfolio manager and editor of the blog Crossing Wall Street. His