If you invested solely in companies that won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award last year, youd do very well financially. For the fourth straight year, stock prices of publicly traded U.S. companies that won the award outperformed the Standard & Poor's 500 market index by almost 3-to-1, calculates the Commerce Dept.s National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST).
Stock prices of the parent companies of the six winners--ADAC Laboratories, Eastman Chemical Co., Federal Express Corp., Motorola Inc., Solectron Corp., and Zytec Corp.--outperformed the S&P 500 by a 2.7-to-1 margin (calculated from first business day of the month after the winners announcement date through Dec. 1), says NIST. The six firms achieved a 394.5% return on investment during the period compared with a 146.9% return for the S&P 500. Similar Baldrige Index studies by NIST since 1994 also have found that Baldrige winners stocks outperform the S&P index.
