Utah's largest publicly held companies, as a group, didn't fare quite as well as their national counterparts during the first quarter of this year.
The Salt Lake Tribune/Bloomberg Index, which measures the share-price performance of the state's 27 best-known public companies, gained a respectable 3.4 percent during the first quarter but still fell short of the 4.1 percent gain by the Dow Jones industrial average and the 4.9 percent jump in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.
"What we saw during the first quarter was the stock market struggling to climb a wall of justifiable worry," said John Bird, president of Albion Financial Group in Salt Lake City.
He noted, though, that stock market investors typically are looking ahead and trying to anticipate what will happen to the economy over the next six to 12 months. "And what investors were seeing, despite all the problems with the economy, is that the Fed's support of the financial system remains intact and that there seems to be some pent-up consumer demand."
Bird suggested that helped create a disconnect in the minds of many investors who put aside long-term worries about macro issues such as the nation's growing debt problem to concentrate on more short-term concerns -- such as how the companies they are considering investing in will do in the months ahead.
In Utah, investors bid up the shares of 17 of the 27 companies that make up the Tribune/Bloomberg Index.
Those gains ranged from a relatively modest 4 percent increase in the price of Questar Corp.'s stock to the blistering 70 percent run-up in the value of Zions Bancorp's shares, which in addition to leading the Tribune/Bloomberg index also was the top-performing stock in the S&P 500.
Zions was among Utah's worst-performing stocks in 2009, falling 48 percent for the year. And it was during that time Zions CEO Harris Simmons waved off the calls of some analysts who wanted the bank holding company to raise as much as $1 billion to shore up its balance sheet and repay the $1.4 billion it had earlier received in bailout funds.
"They were patient with raising capital and they continue to be patient, and that's turned out to be an intelligent strategy," said David Jackson, an analyst at Penn Capital Management, which has $4.7 billion under management and holds 1.2 million Zions shares.
A newcomer to the index, Ancestry.com, saw its shares rise 21 percent since the first of the year to close Wednesday at $16.95. The Provo-based online genealogical research company went public in early November, selling 7.4 million shares at $13.50 each.
"We were happy to make the transition to a public company," said CEO Tim Sullivan. "We're happy to see nice steady movement of the stock upward. And more than anything else, we're happy we're in the mode now where we're beginning to tell the (company's) story to more investors in the broader financial community, because it's a story a lot of them were not familiar with."
Ancestry.com was the fifth-best performing Utah stock during the first quarter.
Utah-based oil and gas exploration company, FX Energy, had the seventh-best performing shares. The company's stock was up 20 percent.
FX Energy has extensive land holdings in Poland and during the fourth quarter 2009 brought a major natural gas well online there, said spokesman Scott Duncan. The company expects to bring in three more wells on the same property in the months ahead.
"In this country there is a surplus of natural gas, while in Europe there is a shortage," he said. "We hold several million acres in Poland and that is generating a lot of interest."
On the flip side of the Tribune/Bloomberg Index, there were 10 Utah publicly held companies that saw their share prices decline.
Shares of Myriad Genetics were down 8 percent during the first quarter. A federal judge in New York this week invalidated parts of two of the company's patents related to human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer. And shares of Headwaters Inc., which counts on the construction industry for much of its revenue, were down 30 percent during the first quarter.
