Summary
Thank you for your support in 2024 As 2024 draws to a close, we at Argus Research wish you and your colleagues and families a relaxing, joyful and safe holiday season. It has been our privilege to bring you our insights, commentary, forecasts, coverage and portfolio advice over the past twelve months. As always, we remain committed to providing high-quality, informed and thoughtful advice and recommendations to our clients, and we thank you for choosing to support and partner with us. As we move forward to 2025, may we all look forward to a healthy and peaceful start to the new year. In 2024, as the bull market continued to develop, we at Argus Research have seen countless successes and growth. Product Development As always, we have continued to invest in, expand and improve the Argus Research service. One way we do this is by adding new stocks to our coverage universe, so our coverage list is dynamic, relevant, and includes the stocks that investors own. In the past year we have launched coverage for Arcadium Lithium plc, Axon Enterprise Inc., Brown & Brown, Cava Group, Constellation Energy Group, DoorDash Inc., GE Vernova, Palantir Technologies, Pilgrim’s Pride, Snowflake Inc., Smurfit WestRock plc, Solventum, Super Micro Computer Inc., Targa Resources Inc. and Veralto Corp. Not all of these stocks are on the BUY list, but that’s part of the benefit of being independent. We want to make more changes in 2025: we will launch new shares from spin-offs and increase coverage in the financial sector, clean energy and information technology. Keep those suggestions coming! We continually try to improve our research products and investment tools to add new and important information or simply make them more user-friendly. For example, in 2024, our Director of Economic Research, Chris Graja, CFA, added a “Thinking Outside the Box” feature to the popular Viewpoint report. “Thinking Outside the Box” gave Chris a new forum to analyze the economic and investment implications of a variety of topics from unconventional sources, including: artificial intelligence, Bitcoin, and a Federal Reserve “rule of thumb” cited by Ben Bernanke. In our fixed income department, Chris has introduced new indicators, including the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Proxy Funds Rate, to help us all better understand the economic impact of the Fed’s future guidance on the economy and to guide expectations analyze the market about the Fed. actions. Chris was always working on his predictions and integrated a number of new alternative and high-frequency indicators into his models. These include the Weekly Economic Index, maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, to measure changes in economic momentum and provide context around conventional government indicators that are released with delays and are often subject to major revisions. The robust new data and approach improved our basic long-term forecasts for growth, employment, inflation and interest rates, helping clients with their longer-term business, retirement and education planning. In terms of new products, we have refined a new package of institutional services in 2024. These offerings include analyst access, business access and revenue models. The new suite complements current institutional products such as Risk Surveillance and Corporate Actions Screens and Surveys, Watch Lists, Gap Coverage, Morning Calls and IPO Research. Other new product initiatives in recent years include Options research, ETF research, ratings and model portfolios, and extensive quantitative coverage through our A6 reports. We continue to integrate our research conclusions into investment strategies and experience good reception (and capital growth) in portfolios built around themes such as growth and income, dividend growth, innovation and sustainable impact investing. These portfolios are licensed as models, trusts and separately managed accounts directly and on numerous platforms. How are they? Our Innovators strategy won four separate Top Guns awards from PSN in 2024: Q1, PSN Top Guns Two-Star Award for a top 10 performance during the one-year period ending March 31; Q2, PSN Top Guns One-Star Award for a top-10 performance for the most recent June quarter and a Two-Star Award for a top-10 performance for the one-year period ending June 30; and Q3, PSN Top Guns Two-Star Award for a top-10 performance during the one-year period ending September 30. People We have expanded our staff over the past two years, adding Tyler Jacobson as Network IT and Cybersecurity Programmer in October 2023; Alexandra Yates as Associate Analyst in September; Olivia Frey as editor in September 2024 and Sebastian Conrado as software programmer in October. Growth has also taken place within the existing team. Security analyst Kris Ruggeri has taken over coverage of the industrial sector, and senior analyst Christine Dooley will move from sector research to analyzing a group of high-yield stocks. I will expand the coverage of a new clean energy infrastructure universe. We’ve also introduced new voices and perspectives to our popular interactive offering. Director of Economic Research Chris Graja, CFA, and Director of Fixed Income Research Kevin Heal have been hosting monthly webinars, giving research director Jim Kelleher, CFA, an occasional break. In the meantime, Christine Dooley is busy taking on Q&A duties for our monthly webinars. We also had the opportunity in recent weeks to celebrate the long and illustrious career of Sharon Dorsey Wagoner, who will retire from Argus Investors Counsel Inc. at the end of 2024. Sharon is a granddaughter of Argus Research Group founder Harold B. Dorsey. According to the books, she started her career at Argus in 1989, but that could easily be the year the company first started paying her. She mentored me as a young editor when I joined the company, also in 1989, so she clearly already had experience at the company. A lawyer by training, she became an analyst at Argus in the fall of 1989, covering consumer and healthcare companies. She exuded analytical independence, and I think she is the only analyst at Argus – and perhaps the only analyst on Wall Street – who ever dared to put a SELL rating on Walt Disney Co. Argus naturally promotes personal growth, so she built a career with the firm, becoming a portfolio manager at our RIA, Argus Investors’ Counsel Inc., and eventually chair of the subsidiary. Sharon remains a member of the Argus Research Group Board of Directors. While we wish her the best of luck in her retirement, we also won’t be shy about sharing her thoughts and views on important business developments and opportunities. With Sharon’s retirement, plus the adoption of the flexible work schedules we implemented post-pandemic, we have made the decision to close our Stamford Connecticut office and move the money management group back to our headquarters at 61 Broadway in New York City . The Connecticut-based operations added valuable weight, perspective and credibility to the Argus Research Group for many years. The Stamford offices have been important to our message of independence, and thus to key relationships during the Global Analyst Research Settlement, as well as to clients and partners such as the United Nations and the London Stock Exchange. Our location in Connecticut has allowed us to recruit and retain talented local employees and provide quality services to local accounts, such as the State of Connecticut. The original Stamford office even served as the company’s headquarters for a time when 61 Broadway closed following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Argus Investors’ Counsel, led by Sharon, has a robust history that we will leverage in the future. We are proud of their work for countless world-class clients, like the United Mine Workers. We are proud of the SEC’s spotless record and grateful for the long-standing investment focus on financial strength and diversification, which have been installed as core principles in the investigative activities. With the move back to NYC, we look forward to expanding operations by adding more products and marketing to more customers served from the headquarters. Plans for 2025 The research industry continues to change, creating new opportunities for nimble participants. European research regulations, which have now been in place for more than five years, have led to a reduction in the number of research analysts and research coverage, especially for small and mid-cap stocks. This threatens the ability of newer entrepreneurial companies to raise capital efficiently. Argus is part of the solution to this problem. After consultation with stock exchanges around the world, Argus has established a sponsored research report and distribution service. The sponsored reports differ in look and feel from our analyst reports, are unrated and are distributed free of charge through our website and other institutional and media channels. The offering includes press releases and earnings estimates available on major aggregation platforms. In 2024, our sales team won six new sponsored companies. We also benefit from institutional research opportunities in alpha capture programs, in enterprise access services and with global accounts. Over the years, Argus has remained committed to Thought Leadership. From the home page of our website, we post Christine Dooley’s popular weekly stock list, as well as a weekly economic commentary from research director Jim Kelleher, CFA. We publish a Daily Spotlight, written by myself or Chris Graja, and a daily Market View. This year we distributed white papers on Innovation Investing, ESG Investing and Dividend Growth Investing. In terms of sharing our expertise with the financial press, our Director of Financial Services Research Steve Biggar is deeply committed to bringing the Argus brand to market. In 2024, he promoted Argus through appearances on American Banker, Bloomberg TV, BNN Bloomberg Canada, Business Insider, CNBC Asia, CNBC US, Dow Jones, Marketplace Radio, Money Talk Live, Reuters, Schwab Network, The Messenger, The Wall Street Journal and including Yahoo Finance TV. Numerous analysts contributed
