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.
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.
These are uncertain and exhausting times. We are trying to understand and respond to the health and economic effects of COVID-19, which has killed more than 1 million people worldwide and more than 215,000 Americans while leaving many businesses and employees scrambling to stay afloat. We are concerned about the heated election rhetoric fed by extreme partisanship and divisive politics. Many of us feel worn down and nervous, especially as we face a possible winter resurgence of the virus. Conventional wisdom tells us that the markets do not like uncertainty, and they have been bouncing all over in recent weeks and even months.
There are lots of things to worry about these days. We are in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, with no cure and no vaccine. Most scientists agree that what the U.S. is experiencing is not the second wave – it is just a surge in the first. This health uncertainty has caused deep concern among investors and has, from time to time, rattled the markets.
