Death Care Index holds its own against other indexes for 1Q 2025

April 7, 2025/Finance/

Funeral Director Daily’s analysis of the Death Care Index (DCI) for the 1st Quarter of 2025 shows that the four public companies that comprise the index held up favorably as a whole when compared against the larger followed indexes such as the Nasdaq, the S&P 500, and the Dow Jones Industrial averages.

Editors Note: This article was ready to go before the markets dropped in value last Thursday and Friday. I continued to keep it in the que for being published regardless because to me it represented a point in time and how Death Care compared to the rest of the investment world for the period of January 1, 2025 until March 31, 2025, a time period which did not include last Thursday and Friday.

For the quarter the DCI was down in stock price, compared to the first day of the year by about 3.9%. That number, negative as it was, still beat both the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 and trailed only the composite average of the Dow Jones. Here’s how those larger indexes fared for the quarter:

Nasdaq: -10.3%
S&P 500: -4.7%
Dow Jones Industrials: -0.9%

Here’s a table of how the four companies that comprise the FDD Death Care Index fared:

As you can see, investors in three of the four DCI companies valued the companies at virtually the same valuations as they were valued at the beginning of the year. The one exception to that fact was that the value of Matthews International dropped almost 20% for the quarter.

To be fair, only about 45-48% of Matthews International’s revenue comes from Death Care. They are the parent company of Matthews Aurora Caskets and Matthews Cremation as well as offer products in the cemetery memorialization business.

In all fairness to the Death Care market and Matthews International, it was probably not the memorialization segment of the company that lead to the stock drop. As this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette relates, during the first quarter of 2025 Matthews had both a challenge to its board membership and announced the sale of one of the other non-Death Care companies in its business portfolio.

Matthews Board Chairman Alvaro Garcia-Tunon made this comment in the Post-Gazette article, “We appreciate the constructive dialogue that we’ve had with our shareholders and want to thank them for their feedback and support. That said, we know we have more work ahead to improve performance and deliver the results our shareholders expect from us.”

That same article made note of this situation and wrote of Garcia-Tunon, “He called the results of the vote a “validation of Matthews’ strategy, our board and the leadership of our CEO Joe Bartolacci, as well as the governance actions we have taken in recent years in response to shareholder feedback.”

The Big “Melt-Down” – As alluded to in the Editor’s note above, the public stock markets had a “melt-down” on Thursday and Friday, more than likely due to the tariffs imposed by President Trump. The result of that situation, so far, has had the major broad-based market indexes drop by about 10-12% over the two days.

For your information, I put together this small chart of the DCI companies performance in the few days between the end of the 1st Quarter and Friday — a 4-day period. In comparison to the major indexes, the Death Care Index is down only 6%. In “relative” terms, that’s again favorable to the broader indexes.

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take: There’s bound to be some anxiety in the greater markets, not only in the United States but in markets around the world, as President Trump sets his sails on his vision for America’s economy. I think the the relative stability of the Death Care companies stock prices both for the quarter and during the “Melt-down” indicates that investors don’t believe that the business fortunes of these companies, especially those that deal in services rather than products, will be much affected by President Trump’s greater economic vision.

Disclaimer— The author of this article for Funeral Director Daily holds stock positions in Service Corporation International, Carriage Services, and Security National Financial Corporation.

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