The Bot Brief

"There is no force on earth more powerful than an idea whose time has come."     

- Victor Hugo

 

 

 

The final week of trading in 2023 saw a rather benign ending to a rather turbulent year for the stock market and bots in particular. The Bot Index gained a mere 68 basis points while the broad index advanced only 32 basis points.

 

The only gainer of note for the week was NIO Inc., who rose 7.72%. Ironically, its chief competitor in the electric car space, Tesla, was one of the leading losers, down 1.61%.

 

For the entirety of the year, the Bot Index rose 

24.89%, barely exceeding the 24.23% gain of the S & P 500.

 

 

 

 

The performance of the components of the Bot Index could best be characterised by a barbell configuration. There were eight companies whose stocks actually declined during the year and eight stocks that gained near fifty per cent or greater. A table of the gainers and losers depict the extent of the heads and tails of the performance schematic.

 

 

NVIDIA Corp. +495.22%

AeroVironment +126.04%

Tesla +101.17%

Amazon +80.89%

Google +58.83%

Lincoln Electric +50.50%

Apple +48.18%

ABB Ltd. +45.44%

 

 

 

 

Cyberdyne -32.78%

Faro Corp. -23.39%

iRobot -19.60%

Raytheon -16.62%

Northrup Grumman -14.20%

3D Systems -14.19%

Cognex Corp. -11.40%

Lockheed Martin -6.83%

 

There were several interesting observations from the diversity of performance by the components of the Bot Index.  To underscore the wide variance between the gainers and losers, there were no holdings that were within 3% points of the arithmetic mean of the entire index. There was one international company in the list of highest gainers – ABB Ltd. and one international name in the greatest decliners – Cyberdyne. 

 

In an era where there was significant international turmoil with wars involving Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Gaza, together with rising concerns in N. Korea and China, it was surprising that three of the biggest losers for the year were in the defense industry.