At Peachtree Investment Partners, we have a long-term relationship with our clients. We work with you to build a customized portfolio that reflects your goals, your financial situation and your approach to risk. Our primary focus has been and remains on preservation of principal.
We use a number of criteria to evaluate companies for client portfolios. We look at a company’s historical performance as well as the potential for future performance. In particular, we consider a company’s profitability and its positioning in the market. We also prefer companies that pay dividends.
We make dividend-paying stocks the centerpiece of our clients’ portfolios. Dividend-paying stocks can add significantly to overall returns and also can help smooth out volatile markets. Although we do invest in some select stocks that do not pay dividends, we focus mainly on those that do.
As more Americans became fully vaccinated and COVID cases began to fall, many people felt like they were awakening from a long nightmare. That optimism also was felt by investors. The Standard & Poor's 500 index closed June 30 at a record high and was up 14% for the year at the end of the second quarter. Meanwhile, the Dow and the Nasdaq each rose 12% for the second quarter.
Spring is always a hopeful time, a season of rebirth. But this spring seems a little more welcome than most. After more than a year of being on the dark side of a worldwide pandemic, it seems the light may be returning. Of course, everyone still needs to exercise caution – we are not out of the woods yet, as recent COVID-19 numbers are showing. But the availability of vaccines is making a return to normal seem possible in the relatively near future.
2020 was a year like no other. There were some bright spots, of course – most notably the very strong performance of the stock market. But for the most part, we seemed to spend much of the year lurching from crisis to crisis, with rising death counts, closing schools, growing unemployment. As we move into 2021, many of us are hoping mostly for a more normal experience.
