Monday’s stock market plunge took some of Clark County’s publicly traded companies with it, but local financial planners said they are hesitant to characterize the dip as a catastrophe.
“Your investment philosophy — if it doesn’t anticipate a day like today, it’s not much of a philosophy,” said Tim Massie, a financial planner and founder of Battle Ground-based Timepiece Financial Planning.
Most of his clients, he said, are retired or approaching retirement and generally maintain more diverse portfolios better equipped to handle loss.
“(The Monday losses) are not a huge surprise. We’ve had a relatively longer period of lower volatility. … (The market) doesn’t just go up,” Massie said. “I think we’ve had a pretty good year to date, and this is as old as dirt.”
Southwest Washington’s largest companies deal in information technology, pharmaceuticals and aerospace engineering — all industries that took a hit Monday.
For example, shares of Barrett Business Services, a consulting firm among Vancouver’s largest companies on the New York Stock Exchange, fell 4.58 percent Monday. Since Aug. 5 of last year, however, Barrett’s share price is still up 44.13 percent.
Absci Corp., a Vancouver biotechnology company, saw its share price fall 8.44 percent Monday, but its value is up about 100 percent since August. Northwest Pipe Co., a major pipeline and concrete product manufacturer, saw share prices increase 5.96 percent Monday — adding to an already strong trend amid the company’s most profitable year yet.
Several other Vancouver companies, however, were having a rough 2024 even before Monday’s stumble. Software company ZoomInfo and semiconductor producer nLIGHT each experienced a consistent slide in their share prices since January.
Camas-based nLIGHT released its second-quarter earnings report just last week, revealing the company’s revenue between April 1 and June 30 was $50.5 million, compared with $53.3 million from the second quarter of 2023.
CEO Scott Keeney said he remains optimistic for the rest of the year, however, adding that shifting nLIGHT’s focus away from operating in China and toward domestic aerospace and defense contracts has been challenging but should be productive in the long term. Monday’s losses on the stock exchange weren’t of major concern, he said.
“I don’t have a lot of thoughts on it,” Keeney said. “We see large opportunities to continue to grow, and frankly, we’ve been expecting a series of challenges. It’s hard to say what’s going to happen (on a day-to-day basis).”
