Monthly Message

The Wutherich & Co. Composite was up 5.0% in December. This compares with the S&P/TSX being up 1.7%.

Happy New Year! Say what you will about 2020, it was certainly interesting. Commentators will come out with their “Best of the Worst Year”, “Worst of the Worst Year” and so on. We’ll skip all of that. For JF and I, I think we can say that we have had a pretty good year in terms of family and business and feel fortunate that this was the case.

We managed to close out 2020 with a gain of 9.4% for the full year. During February and March we had a strong conviction that, as bleak as things looked, the world was not going to end. We committed as much money as we could to the names in our portfolio with the firm belief that most of them would survive the crisis and some would even benefit from it. While the faith of some of our clients was shaken, they were content to stay with us and some even added to their portfolios (shout-out to……well, you know who you are). We are happy to say that we pulled through 2020 without the marquee names that are driving the major market indexes. I have seen this over and over in my career: when everyone is piling into the same handful of stocks, it is best to look elsewhere for long-term returns. Sure, our portfolio has a few fully priced names in it but there are still some great stories that should help drive returns for years to come.

Just a reminder that JF and I will be hosting a virtual presentation of our “Wutherich & Co.’s Annual Update” on January 27th. Please contact us at jf@wutherich.ca or 514-924-4438 to get your link to the presentation.

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