
Argent Quarterly Investment Commentary – December 2017
“When the wind blows, even turkeys fly.” – Jerry Pogue
We repeat one of our favorite quotes above because it accurately sums up global stock market returns for 2017. In a year where hurricanes laid waste to parts of Texas, Florida and the Caribbean, when geo-political tensions flared with Russia, North Korea and the Middle East, and when, at times, our legislators in Washington, D. C. appeared even more dysfunctional than normal, stock markets had one of the best years in memory. The S&P 500 Index, a proxy for U.S. large company performance, never even had a week with so much as a two percent drop, and recorded gains in every single month of the year for the first time in over 50 years. Argent has investors utilizing four strategies – Large Cap Growth, Dividend Select, Mid Cap and Small Cap Core – and they all benefitted from the upward surge. Now it is on to 2018 to keep the upward momentum.