Client Letter
Matthew Young, President and CEO, writes his clients letters keeping them abreast of changes that can affect the portfolios with Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. You can sample some of these letters below.
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May 2017
I’ve written critically of Amazon.com’s profitability in past letters, but my criticism of the company doesn’t extend to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO. Bezos may have run Amazon.com for years without turning a meaningful profit, but there is no denying the guy is brilliant. In the span of two decades, Bezos turned Amazon.com into one of America’s largest companies.
April 2017
In 2015, when the stock market squeaked out a small gain, it was a handful of the most speculative names (the so-called FANG stocks, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google) that accounted for the entire market return. If your portfolio didn’t include FANG stocks, it might have been down in 2015. Year-to-date, stocks are tracking a similar path, with a handful of names driving the lion’s share of performance in the S&P 500.
March 2017
I was recently offered home tickets to see the Boston Celtics. As a family, we had not attended a Celtics game, so we decided to accept the tickets, leave the warmth of Naples, Florida, and journey our way to the freezing temperatures of Massachusetts.
February 2017
It took nearly 18 years for the Dow Jones Industrial Average to go from 10,000 to 20,000. Factoring in time and return, that works out to a compounded annual gain of 4.2%, not including dividends. And that’s the key—not including dividends. In fact, while the Dow doubled from its March 29, 1999, level, when you factor in dividends, the total return becomes 205%. In other words, more than half the return of an investment in the Dow during this period was delivered by dividends.
