TOWER BRIDGE ADVISORS

That gap between price-driven and trading-driven change matters because the real posture this quarter was net buying, not retreating. Among the 50 largest positions, 32 were increased in share count and only 13 were trimmed — the opposite ratio of a manager pulling in its horns. Total reported assets grew 4.6% quarter over quarter, from $990 million to just over $1.0 billion, even as several of the largest individual positions posted paper losses on price alone. Duke Energy (shares up 12.9%), Moody's (up 11.2%) and Walmart (up 10.6%) were the more emphatic size-ups this quarter, alongside smaller adds to Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Thermo Fisher.

The four full exits are a tighter, more idiosyncratic story: Becton Dickinson ($7.3 million), Eli Lilly ($7.2 million), Berkshire Hathaway Class B ($6.2 million) and American Express ($6.2 million) were all sold out completely — a medical-device name, a pharma name and two financials, with no obvious shared thread. What replaced them wasn't more single-stock conviction: three of the four new positions are funds — the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF ($18.6 million, the single largest addition of the quarter), the Schwab US Dividend Equity ETF ($7.6 million) and the Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Index Fund ($7.2 million) — alongside one new individual name, Waste Management ($6.7 million). For a book built almost entirely from single stocks, adding three fund wrappers in one quarter, together larger than any single one of the four exits, reads like a deliberate step toward broader diversification even while the stock-picking side of the book keeps expanding.