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 provide our insights, commentary, forecasts, coverage, and portfolio advice to you for the past 12 months. As always, we remain committed to delivering high-quality, well-researched, and thoughtful advice and recommendations to our clients, and we thank you for choosing to support and partner with us. As we move on to 2025, may we all look forward to a healthy and peaceful start to the New Year. During 2024, as the bull market continued to progress, we at Argus Research experienced numerous achievements 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 Universe of Coverage, ensuring that our coverage list is dynamic, relevant, and includes the stocks investors own. In the past year, we launched coverage of 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 advantage of being independent. We look to make more changes in 2025 — launching coverage of new stocks from spin-offs as well as increasing coverage in Financial, Clean Energy, and Information Technology. Keep those suggestions coming! We are continually looking to improve our research products and investment tools to add new and important information or simply make them easier to use. As an 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 investing implications of wide-ranging 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 forward guidance on the economy and to analyze the market’s anticipation of Fed actions. Always working on his forecasts, Chris integrated into his models some new alternative and high-frequency indicators. These include the Weekly Economic Index tracked by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, to gauge changes in economic momentum and provide context around conventional government indicators that are released with a lag and are often subject to large revisions. The robust new data and approach enhanced our long-term baseline forecasts for growth, employment, inflation and interest rates, assisting clients with long-horizon business, retirement, and college planning. On the new product front in 2024, we have been refining a new suite of institutional services. This offering includes Analyst Access, Corporate Access, and Earnings Models, among other features. 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 over the past few years have included Options Research, ETF Research, Ratings, and Model Portfolios, and extensive quant coverage through our A6 reports. We continue to integrate our research conclusions into investment strategies, and are experiencing good reception (and asset growth) in portfolios built around themes such as Growth & 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 doing? 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 Sept. 30. People We have added to our staff over the past two years, bringing on Tyler Jacobson as a Network IT and Cybersecurity Programmer in October 2023; Alexandra Yates as an Associate Analyst in September; Olivia Frey as an Editor in September 2024, and Sebastian Conrado as a Software Programmer in October. There has also been growth among the existing team. Security Analyst Kris Ruggeri has taken over coverage of the Industrial sector, and Senior Analyst Christine Dooley will be moving over from sector research to analyze a group of high-yield stocks. I will build out coverage of a new Clean Energy Infrastructure universe. We also introduced new voices and perspectives to our popular interactive offerings. Director of Economic Research Chris Graja, CFA, and Director of Fixed Income Research Kevin Heal have hosted monthly webinars, giving Director of Research Jim Kelleher, CFA, a break every now and then. Meanwhile Christine Dooley is stepping up to take on Q&A management duties for our monthly webinars. We also have had the opportunity in recent weeks to celebrate the long and illustrious career of Sharon Dorsey Wagoner, who is retiring from Argus Investors Counsel Inc. at the end of 2024. Sharon is a grand-daughter of the founder of Argus Research Group, Harold B. Dorsey. She is on the books as having started her career at Argus in 1989, but that might just be the year in which the company first started paying her. She mentored me as a young editor when I joined the firm, also in 1989, so she clearly already had experience at the company. A lawyer by training, in the fall of 1989 she became an analyst at Argus, covering consumer and healthcare companies. She breathed analytical independence, and I think is the only analyst at Argus — and maybe the only analyst on Wall Street — who ever dared to put a SELL rating on Walt Disney Co. Argus, of course, promotes personal growth, so she advanced at the company to become a portfolio manager at our RIA, Argus Investors’ Counsel Inc., and ultimately Chair of the subsidiary. Sharon will remain on the Board at Argus Research Group. While we wish her well in her retirement, we also will not be shy to offer her opinions and views on key corporate developments and opportunities. With Sharon’s retirement, plus the adoption of the flexible work schedules we implemented after the pandemic, we made the decision to close down our office in Stamford Connecticut and move the money management group back into our corporate headquarters at 61 Broadway in New York City. The Connecticut-based operations for years added a valuable heft, perspective, and credibility to Argus Research Group. 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. Being in Connecticut 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 for a time even served as the corporate headquarters, when 61 Broadway was shut down after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Argus Investors’ Counsel, led by Sharon, has a robust history that we will leverage going forward. We are proud of their work on behalf of numerous world-class clients such as the United Mine Workers. We are proud of the spotless compliance record with the SEC and grateful for the long-time investment focus on financial strength and diversification, which have been installed as core principles in the research operations. With the move back to NYC, we look forward to expanding the operation by adding more products and by marketing to more clients that are served out of the corporate headquarters. Plans for 2025 The research industry continues to change, opening new opportunities for nimble participants. European research regulations, now in place for more than five years, have led to a reduction in research analysts and research coverage, particularly for small- and mid-cap stocks. This threatens the ability of newer entrepreneurial firms to raise capital efficiently. Argus is part of the solution to this problem. After consulting with exchanges around the globe, Argus has created a sponsored research report and distribution service. The sponsored reports differ from our Analyst Reports in look-and-feel, do not include a rating, and are distributed for free from our website and other institutional and media channels. The offering includes press releases and earnings estimates available on the major aggregate platforms. In 2024, our sales team brought in six new sponsored companies. We are also taking advantage of institutional research opportunities on alpha-capture programs, in corporate access services, and with global accounts. Through 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 well as a Weekly Economic Commentary from Director of Research Jim Kelleher, CFA. We publish a Daily Spotlight, written by either myself or Chris Graja, and daily Market View. We distributed whitepapers this year on Innovation Investing, ESG Investing, and Dividend Growth Investing. As for sharing our expertise with the financial press, our Director of Financial Services Research Steve Biggar is highly committed to marketing the Argus brand name. In 2024, he promoted Argus through appearances with American Banker, Bloomberg TV, BNN Bloomberg Canada, Business Insider, CNBC Asia, CNBC U.S., Dow Jones, Marketplace Radio, Money Talk Live, Reuters, Schwab Network, The Messenger, The Wall Street Journal, and Yahoo Finance TV, among others. Numerous analysts worked with
