Given $LAKE’s announcement last Wednesday stating a new “Strategic Partnership” with LineDrive, a leading outsourced sales and marketing organization, it gives us a chance to highlight a part of a post-earnings April conversation with the company’s CEO Roger Shannon about expanding LAKE’s market presence.

The partnership can be certainly viewed as a foreshadowing of things to come in the near future regarding Lakeland’s M&A initiatives, with the move potentially putting them in a position to accelerate the effectiveness of new partnerships or acquisitions.

A few weeks ago, I was getting caught up with the messages in Geoinvesting’s Twitter inbox. There was a message I had not read yet from somebody who said they found us after listening to a podcast and wanted to know more about our services.

It was a recent Podcast from one of the most popular voices on Twitter, Chris Irons, or Quoth The Raven (@QTRResearch), with his guest and trading expert, Sang Lucci (@SangLucci). Raven used to work at GeoInvesting a few years ago, but we hadn’t really kept in touch since then. I recently ran into Sang Lucci in Puerto Rico, where I usually spend half the year. Sang rents out fully loaded work stations at a spot called Trade Space.

Ben Claremon, the host of Compounders Podcast, which has a regular spot on Bobby Kraft’s channel on YouTube, Planet Microcap, picked Maj’s brain on the challenges of being a microcap investor in recent years, the things that go into assessing management teams through interview, portfolio construction, microcap misconceptions, and opportunities in other markets such as those in Canada and little-followed sectors.

Over the last six months or so, we have tweaked our Skull Session events with management teams to do our best to choose companies that we think are entering growth inflection points. We won’t get them all right, but we think this goal will create immense value for our premium investor community. Part of this goal includes inviting management teams to be guests on our Skull Session events the day of or day after their companies report important news, like earnings and contract announcements.

It’s been a shorter span of time than usual between our Monthly Forums, with April’s occurring at the beginning of the month, earlier than we historically held the event. We had a lot to go through, but taking center stage was some important commentary on artificial intelligence. 

We discussed implementing an AI stock screen driven by feedback from our premium Twitter audience. Recognizing that AI is a trending topic, the aim is to sift through the hype to identify companies genuinely leveraging AI in ways that could positively impact their long-term growth and financials.

If you are immediately wondering what baseball has to do with investing, don’t worry, I’ll get to my “growing as an investor” teachable moment in a second. First, let’s talk about sports as an analogy that bleeds into that moment.

Have you ever heard of Oscar Gamble?

In 2014, Bill James wrote an article covering his analysis of the best ever players coming off the bench in baseball. If you are not a sports fanatic, the bench consists of the players that back up the starting player lineup.

Bill concluded that Oscar Gamble’s “coming off the bench’ performance” in 1979 was the best of all time (as of 2014). Oscar was an outfielder and designated hitter while in the major leagues between 1969 and 1985, a span during which he played for seven different teams.