BusinessWeek Logo

Cautious on Stocks

Posted by: Karyn McCormack on January 26

A few things are bugging Jim Huguet about the stock market. He’s president of Great Companies LLC and runs the TransAmerica IDEX Great Companies-America fund (IGAAX), and stopped by yesterday afternoon for a visit. He worries that a lot of people are still not back in the market since the tech bubble burst in 2000. Plus, he doesn’t see any reason for oil prices to reteat given the limited supply and strong demand, along with the increasing cost of drilling.

Huguet intrigues me because he spends a lot of time focusing on CEOs. This is the most important factor when he buys a stock, he says. He looks for a chief that can clearly articulate the company’s strategy. Age also matters: he prefers a younger CEO, in their early 50s, to one aged 60 or older that will only spend a few years at the helm. I’ll have a longer interview with him on our site in the next few days (with his top holdings, etc.), but in the meantime you can check out what he told us last summer.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/

Post a comment

 

About

Businessweek’s Lauren Young, Aaron Pressman, Emily Thornton, Amy Feldman, Ben Levisohn, and Ben Steverman focus on matters great and small for investors, from the views of a hot fund manager to an explanation of the latest products devised by Wall Street’s rocket scientists. Exploring trends in any area, from bonds and stocks to closed-end funds and futures, always with an eye towards giving investors a better understanding of the sometimes confusing and often chaotic world of finance. Standard & Poor’s senior index analyst Howard Silverblatt will also provide his take on companies’ finances and the markets. Voted one of the “Top 100 Finance Blogs” in 2007.

RSS Feed: Investing Insights

BW Mall - Sponsored Links