Defense stocks looking back and looking ahead
There was a time at Investorideas.com hub of sector portals when our Homelanddefensestocks.com dominated the group. We had ten featured companies, hosted several very successful online investor conferences (one with 14 public companies participating) a live conference at the Press Club in Washington DC that had significant impact on the trading of all participants. The sector was hot. We were hot- featured in Business Week online twice and several other publications including CBS Market watch radio.


So looking at 2006 and the larger defense stocks - and their performance- with Lockheed Martin giving investors a 45 percent gain in share price, Raytheon a 30 percent gain , Boeing with 27 percent and Northrop Grumman showing 12 percent- why did some of the smaller players loose their luster? We saw some of the small players have major losses in share price. Was it just an example of the overall trend where investors were looking for large caps vs. small caps? Or was it the sector got overplayed by retail investors and those that did not deliver - got punished!

According to a regular contributor to our site - Scott Sacknoff-"Defense and homeland security companies continued to outperform the broader market in 2006 as the benchmark SPADE Defense Index (DXS) gained 19.33% and marked the seventh consecutive year it has outperformed the S&P500. It is a remarkable run that has seen the sector generate alpha over the broader markets not just for seven years running but in 20 of the last 26 quarters. This past year saw the sector outperform the broader markets by 571 basis point. And since 2000, the Index has gained a whopping 113.86% compared with a 3.47% LOSS by the S&P 500."

We found our HDS portal move down the ranks and loose its number one ranking. We recently saw some new life injected as the portal and Scott got coverage on CNBC on January 2nd.

Maybe it’s a sign of things to come.