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.
Early last week on March 18, 2024, I spoke with Sebastian Krog (@SebKrog), microcap investing-focused Substack author of the column Treasure Hunting. He shared that at 26, he’s actually not a full-time investor, but owns and operates a marketing agency, which has been his primary focus for the past five years.
In his spare time, including weekends and evenings, he dedicates himself to researching and writing about stocks, particularly microcaps. His newsletter currently has over 1000 followers on Substack.
His journey into investing began at 16, initially inspired by the concept of investing in the stock market through ETFs, as advocated by a prominent figure in Germany. This led him to start with small, monthly investments in ETFs. As he explored investing further, he briefly ventured into large-cap stocks like Tesla, Facebook, and Amazon.
Well respected financial Substack newsletter writer, Dakota Quint (Left Field Investing) (@LeftField_FHRS), joined me and my analyst, Jan Švenda, to discuss Model Portfolio Holding $CPHRF (CPH.TO), a specialty pharmaceutical company in Canada that offers an array of skin care products, notably in the areas of acne and keratosis.
Our bullish coverage was initially highlighted in 2 articles, here and here on 9/27/2022 and 10/10/2022, respectively.. Even though shares are up 152% from the first of those analyses, much more gas could be left in the tank.
The company reported earnings last week, helping the stock rise 13% for the week. Since Dakota knows about Cipher intimately, we thought it would be a good idea to chat with him about the company to get his opinion on how the company stands to benefit as the licensee of Moberg Pharma’s AB, (MOB.ST) topical nail fungus treatment, MOB-015, in Canada. While the drug is still not approved to be sold in Canada or the U.S., it has been approved to be sold in 10 European countries.
FTG CEO Brad Bourne’s career has been deeply rooted in the aerospace and defense sectors, reflecting a long-standing passion for these industries. He joined FTG when it was a relatively small enterprise based in Toronto, operating with a revenue of about $20 million. Under his leadership, FTG has aimed to double its business every five years, a goal that, despite challenges such as the pandemic, has seen substantial progress.
A few weeks ago, I revisited the infrastructure screen we began to develop back in 2016, a project I hadn’t examined closely for quite some time. Upon looking at that update that showed up-to-date average returns of 247.91% for the stocks included in the screen, I felt it was time to re-evaluate the past inclusions.
As a follow-up to last week’s primer on the upcoming Skull Session roundtable that was about to take place on February 21, 2024, this week is the perfect opportunity to review the discussion I had with the panel of microcap investing experts to shed light on the nuanced strategies of investing in the small to microcap space, with the expressed intent of idea discovery, case studies and at times, pitches.