June 2015 Performance Commentary

Common share prices were extraordinarily volatile during the month of June. The fact is that a major cloud overhanging worldwide equity markets has been the precarious Greek financial situation and default risk. This ubiquitous financial threat has been discussed, written, emailed et alĀ  everywhere and has distracted investors from the positive U.S. economic fundamentals, record low interest rates, solid corporate earnings announcements and ongoing mergers and acquisitions.

These expanding fears reached a climax toward the latter part of June with heightened default concerns, speculation and brinksmanship. The growing angst and psychological investor negativity even impacted common stocks with absolutely no financial connection to Greece. As a result this late month stock price decline upset the market which affected our ABC portfolios. In fact, as of Tuesday June 23 all five ABC portfolios had positive returns for the month and had started to show respectable year to date performance. Nonetheless, we are heartened by our well-positioned portfolios which outperformed our June benchmarks. More importantly, we were particularly pleased with the ABC North American Deep-Value Fund which ran counter to the market negativity and achieved a +1.93% positive return for June.

In summation, we are very confident with our relatively strong, diversified and liquid ABC portfolios and are quite optimistic for second half 2015 performance.

 

Irwin A. Michael Signature

Irwin A. Michael, President
I.A. Michael Investment Counsel Ltd.

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