It Was a Bum Quarter for Many Area Stocks
Over the past three months investors would have been better off putting their cash in a money market fund or municipal bonds than investing in the average Washington area stock.</br></br>Though conventional wisdom contends that the longest bull market in U.S. history is still thundering ahead, "ambling" would be a more descriptive verb when it came to the second-quarter performance of stocks of companies based in the District, Maryland and Virginia.</br></br>The share price of the average regional company gained just 1.1 percent in the past quarter as measured by the Washington Post-Bloomberg Regional Stock Index. That was the poorest quarterly performance in a year, a dramatic slowdown from the average stock's 12 percent run-up in the first three months of the year.</br></br>With money market accounts and tax-exempt bonds yielding an average 5 percent to 6 percent annually, local investors who parked their money came out ahead of those who ran with the bulls.</br></br>Amid the plodding performance of regional stocks as a group, however, a handful of highflying Maryland and Virginia technology stocks were among the top performers on the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market. They include: