Apr. 5--There was no place to hide for the Buffalo Niagara's stocks to escape the stock market's calamitous first-quarter plunge.

The Buffalo Portfolio, fresh off a 27.4 percent plunge in the fourth quarter, continued its downward spiral in the first three months of 2009, losing another 22.1 percent of its value.

All that ugliness adds up to this: Since the end of September 2008, a portfolio that owned a single share of each locally based stock has lost 43.5 percent of its value.

"It was pretty bad," said Christopher Carosa, who manages the Bullfinch Funds' Greater Western New York Series mutual fund that invests in companies with operations in the Buffalo and Rochester areas.

And it could have been worse, if not for the stock market's rally during the last three weeks of March. At the market's low point, on March 9, the Buffalo Portfolio was down 37 percent for the quarter.

Even though the market rebounded recently, the 22.1 percent plunge in the first quarter still was the third-worst quarterly performance by the local stocks since the Buffalo Portfolio plummeted by nearly 30 percent in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash.

Still, it wasn't all gloom and doom. Seven stocks in the portfolio actually managed to go up during the quarter, including four that gained more than 20 percent. They were led by a 43 percent rebound by Elma motion control equipment and cutlery maker Servotronics Inc.

Despite that showing, most of the 21 stocks in the Buffalo Portfolio suffered, with 14 losing value during the quarter and more than half of them dropping by more than 20 percent. Shares of Gibraltar Industries suffered the hardest fall, losing 60 percent of their value.

That major pocket of weakness meant that the Buffalo Portfolio fell far more than the 13.3 percent drop by the Dow Jones industrial average and the 11.7 percent slide in the broader Standard & Poor's 500 index. And the local stocks couldn't hold a candle to the Nasdaq Composite index's meager 3.1 percent decline.

The local stocks even fared worse than the 15.4 percent drop in the Russell 2000 index of small-company stocks, which is a better benchmark for the small company shares that dominate the Buffalo Portfolio.

The bright spot among the local shares was Servotronics, the lightly traded stock that jumped by 43 percent in the first quarter after the company endured a brutal 2008, losing 73 percent of its value during the final three quarters of last year.