The “AAA” Club: Why The Safest Companies Bet The Market
There are only six companies left with "AAA" ratings from both S&P and Moody’s. The are Automatic Data Processing (ADP), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK), GE (GE), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Exxon (XOM), and Toyota (TM). Wall St. might think that companies…
There are only six companies left with "AAA" ratings from both S&P and Moody’s. The are Automatic Data Processing (ADP), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK), GE (GE), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Exxon (XOM), and Toyota (TM).
Wall St. might think that companies with strong ratings would be modest market performers because they make "safe" business decisions. In reality, all of the companies, except Toyota, have out-performed the S&P over the last year. Toyota at least has the excuse that it operates in an industry which has had two brutal years.
The trick for doing well might seem to be that the companies are diversified. But, that is not entirely true, especially with Exxon and ADP. More likely, the firms do extraordinarily well because they have a very large portion of their business coming from outside the US. While the market may be slowing here, it is still robust in some emerging markets and these operations are moving assets to those regions.
The advantages of being global can be overstated. Emerging countries can be politically unstable. But, for the time being, they produce.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
