Every day, Tom Kelly takes a moment to log on to the New York Times Web site to see how the stock market did the previous day. But he's not there to check out his own portfolio; the head of Neil Kelly Co. says he doesn't play the market. But his high-end clients do, and he knows from experience that the market affects their desire to remodel their homes.
While Kelly generally just looks at the overall market, he does pay special attention to the stocks of certain companies. Neil Kelly Co. is located in Portland, Ore., where technology is the biggest industry. “I like to say that as Intel goes, so go our fortunes,” says Kelly, speaking of the manufacturer of the Pentium processing chips, which employs roughly 20,000 people in Kelly's market area.
You certainly can't blame Kelly for keeping an eye on this stuff. The bursting of the tech “bubble” around the turn of the century sent the company into the second-biggest downturn of his 25-year career. Foresight helped Kelly plan for how to recover as quickly as possible.