Hanson & Doremus Investment Management — 13F Portfolio

Hanson & Doremus Investment Management is an independent registered investment adviser based in Burlington, Vermont. The firm operates as a traditional investment‑counsel practice, providing discretionary portfolio management and broader wealth‑advisory services to individuals, families, trusts, and selected institutional and charitable clients. Portfolios are typically implemented through separately managed accounts, with asset‑allocation and security selection tailored to each client’s objectives, tax circumstances, and cash‑flow needs. The firm is registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and appears in regulatory filings as an institutional investment manager under CIK #0001393944. In that capacity, Hanson & Doremus files quarterly Form 13F reports disclosing its reportable long positions in U.S.-listed equities and certain equity‑linked securities over which it exercises investment discretion. These filings capture only the U.S. equity portion of client portfolios—primarily individual stocks and, where appropriate, listed funds—and do not include fixed income, cash, or smaller non‑reportable holdings that are central to the balanced mandates the firm runs. When organized into a longitudinal 13F History, the disclosures provide a consistent, regulator‑defined view of the firm’s U.S. equity implementation through time.

Hanson & Doremus follows a fundamentally driven, long‑only approach with a pronounced emphasis on business quality, valuation discipline, and capital preservation. The firm typically manages balanced accounts in which equities and investment‑grade fixed income are combined to reflect each client’s risk tolerance and time horizon. The equity sleeve—visible in Form 13F—is constructed from the bottom up and serves as the primary engine of long‑term capital growth. Core elements of the equity philosophy include: - Preference for established companies with durable competitive advantages, understandable business models, and consistent earnings and cash‑flow generation. - Emphasis on balance‑sheet strength and financial resilience, avoiding excessive leverage and opaque capital structures. - Valuation discipline, seeking to own high‑quality businesses at reasonable prices relative to normalized earnings and free cash flow, often with a bias toward dividend‑paying or capital‑return stories suitable for wealth‑management clients. Within the U.S. equity universe, portfolios inferred from 13F filings are broadly diversified across financials, industrials, healthcare, information technology, and consumer sectors, with selective exposure to other areas when fundamentals and valuation are attractive. Highly speculative growth stories, distressed situations, and very small or illiquid names are generally de‑emphasized. Turnover in the reportable book is low to moderate: positions are often held for several years as long as the investment thesis remains intact, with trading driven mainly by company‑specific developments, valuation changes, and client‑level tax and liquidity considerations rather than by short‑term market timing. For allocators, the firm’s filings can be used to track changes in 13F Portfolio Composition over time—issuer count, sector tilts, and capitalization mix—and to assess the consistency of the quality‑value implementation.

Viewed through its SEC filings under CIK #0001393944, Hanson & Doremus Investment Management presents as a fundamentally oriented, quality‑ and valuation‑focused U.S. equity and balanced‑account manager serving a primarily private‑client and smaller‑institutional base. The 13F record shows diversified, long‑only portfolios of established large‑ and mid‑cap issuers across core sectors, with low to moderate turnover and restrained use of speculative names—features consistent with a mandate centered on capital preservation, income support, and steady long‑term compounding. For allocators and oversight bodies, organizing the firm’s holdings into a structured 13F History and analyzing them via a Portfolio Simulator or similar Backtesting Service enables a disciplined, holdings‑based review of implementation. Patterns in 13F Portfolio Composition, combined with a reconstructed equity Volatility Profile, Historical Track Record, and implied Sharpe Ratio, can help clarify how Hanson & Doremus’s equity sleeve has interacted with major equity and interest‑rate regimes, and how its realized behavior compares with broad benchmarks. Because Form 13F illuminates only the long U.S. equity slice of the firm’s activity, 13F‑based analytics should be used as a secondary diagnostic alongside full client‑portfolio information, including fixed income and cash allocations, tax considerations, and specific investment‑policy constraints. As equity, rate, and style cycles continue to evolve, an important question for allocators is how sensitive Hanson & Doremus Investment Management’s quality‑core equity implementation will be to future shifts between growth and value leadership, changing volatility environments, and client demand for downside protection within diversified, multi‑manager portfolios.

The overall risk posture for Hanson & Doremus clients is set at the total‑portfolio level, where equities are combined with bonds and cash to create diversified allocations aligned with spending needs and risk tolerance. Those fixed‑income and liquidity components, which are central to household‑level volatility and drawdown control, are not visible in Form 13F. Within the U.S. equity sleeve that does appear in 13F, risk characteristics are those of a diversified, long‑only, quality‑biased core portfolio: - Portfolios are materially exposed to broad U.S. equity‑market movements; a holdings‑based reconstruction will show significant drawdowns during major market selloffs and participation in subsequent recoveries. - Style and factor tilts arise from a persistent focus on higher‑quality, reasonably valued issuers, typically resulting in exposure to quality and core value factors, and a relative underweight to highly levered or speculative segments. - Sector risk is driven by active but measured allocations in financials, industrials, healthcare, technology, and consumer franchises, so the equity sleeve is sensitive to sector rotations, interest‑rate changes, and shifts in the economic cycle. Portfolios inferred from 13F contain a moderate number of holdings across sectors, limiting extreme single‑name risk while maintaining enough concentration for stock selection and sector tilts to influence outcomes. Low to moderate turnover reinforces a long‑horizon orientation, with realized risk driven more by underlying business and macro developments than by rapid trading. Using the firm’s historical 13F data, allocators can estimate an indicative equity Volatility Profile for the U.S. sleeve by mapping reported positions to historical price series and replaying those holdings through time. When this reconstructed portfolio is run in a Portfolio Simulator or Backtesting Service—normalized to a user‑defined starting notional—it yields a proxy Historical Track Record for the reportable long‑equity component, including the depth and duration of drawdowns, participation in recoveries, and behavior across different style and rate regimes. From that capital trajectory, one can derive risk‑adjusted diagnostics such as an implied Sharpe Ratio for the visible equity subset. These analytics apply only to the 13F‑reportable portion of client assets. They do not incorporate the stabilizing effects of bond ladders, cash, and any non‑U.S. or non‑reportable securities that Hanson & Doremus may employ within complete client portfolios.