GEO Investing

Research Process: EPS Grows Faster than Outstanding Share Count [GeoWire Weekly No. 76]

I was reflecting on a past GeoWire Weekly post from November 2022 where I addressed some factors that made Ufp Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:UFPT) a standout case study in what can happen when company management values maintaining the integrity of capital structure while growing revenue and EPS organically and through acquisitions – UFPT, a designer and custom manufacturer of components, subassemblies, products and packaging utilizing highly specialized foams, films, and plastics primarily for the medical market, made eight acquisitions since 1993.

The company relied on its strong balance sheet to minimally increase its share count as EPS trended higher from 2004, when its bottom line went positive, to 2022, the first time its adjusted EPS broke $3 per share.

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As Silicon Valley Bank Failure Story Unfolds, We Are Staying Focused On What We Do Best [GeoWire Weekly No. 75]

In this Weekly Wrapup, we’re taking a break from our usual subject matter to bring you some material on the Silicon Valley Bank failure debacle to help you understand some different perspectives related to the developing story.

“Silicon Valley Bank structured its loans with the understanding that startups do not earn revenue immediately, managing risk based on their business model. The bank’s main strategy was collecting deposits from businesses financed through venture capital.”

In the end, this event is just another unwinding of the 15 year speculative bubble that will give more credence to stock picking taking precedence over a buy anything strategy. We continue to be very bullish on buying traditional boring growth plus value microcap stock set-ups.

Yesterday night, financial regulators declared that depositors of Silicon Valley Bank, which failed on Friday, will be able to access their full deposits beginning on March 13th. They also unveiled new measures to ensure that deposit withdrawals can be backed up throughout the banking system, in response to concerns about contagion following SVB’s unexpected collapse last week.

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Investing In Canadian Stocks Is Not So Bad After All [GeoWire Weekly No. 74]

I no longer avoid investing in Canada based companies. When you screen for stocks to buy, you might have a desired set of criteria on a quantitative, qualitative and geographical basis.

If you isolate your screen to Canada, natural resource companies will dominate your list. If you love to invest in these types of companies, many of which are in the early stages of development and specialize in mineral and oil exploration and extraction, you’d be in luck.

Canada is one of the most resource-rich countries in the world as the global leader in potash production and a top five global producer of diamonds, gemstones, gold, indium, niobium, platinum group metals, titanium concentrate and uranium. Canada is also the world’s fourth-largest primary aluminum producer, and has the third-largest oil deposits after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.

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Turnarounds as a Type of Special Situation Investment [GeoWire Weekly No. 73]

As far back as I can remember, I put an outsized focus on special situation stock investing because I knew that in some instances, the rewards I could reap from certain outlier circumstances would be worth the research. And it just made investing more fun than a standard value investing approach.

I originally used a written list that laid out a framework for what I was looking for on a daily basis across press releases and Security Exchange Commission (SEC) filings at SEC.gov. Yes, written… Remember I am old!

Later, when I started Geoinvesting, each member of my team had a physical printout of the list so it could be readily visible as an outsized 8.5 x 11 inch post-it note.

Regardless of what position one held at Geo, I made sure that each team member was exposed to the our research process to some degree, with the aid of checklists, even if the list became pinned underneath a paperweight, taped to one of the many whiteboards I had floating on each wall when we used to work in “offices”, or handed back and forth between my colleagues if one went missing prior to a new printout.

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Do Turnaround Specialists Have All The Right Stuff To Achieve Success? [GeoWire Weekly No. 72]

When you think of individuals such Carl Icahn, Ronald O. Perelman and Nelson Peltz, you might think of their knack for business acumen, successful fund management and even philanthropy. However, there is one aspect of these personalities’ exploits that might get overshadowed by the overarching themes of their achievements – a specialty in turning businesses around.  

The reason it is a specialty is because not everyone has the means or frankly, the guts, to put plans in place to take a failing company and turn it around. 

Last week’s foray into the world of executives and portfolio managers at activist fund 180 Degree Capital Corp. (NASDAQ:TURN), Kevin Rendino (CEO) and Daniel Wolfe (President), touched on the reasons why companies consider and ultimately agree to shift the innards of their businesses around. In the end, it really comes down to making them attractive enough for investors to put their money into. We’d suggest that you catch up with that column after reading what we have lined up today.

So, speaking of turnaround specialists, we wanted to bring attention to a few famous ones who excelled at buying or taking a stake in underperforming or struggling companies to help them achieve profitability in various ways. 

We’ll touch upon notable investments made by the turnaround specialist investors above.

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When Activism Intersects Turnarounds and The Microcap Investing Edge [GeoWire Weekly No. 71]

It’s true. There are a lot of investors and hedge fund managers in the realm of microcap investing that have breathlessly echoed what we have been saying about the advantages of investing in the space for some time. We’ve also been saying that the selloff in many microcap stocks is overdone and it’s time to really pay attention to where the growth and value are.

Investment ideas don’t have to be screaming in your face at close range. Sometimes it is nuanced, which is why we are so keyed in on deeper research, be it by virtue of idea generation or education, and connecting with the content of peer analysis and discoveries outside the walls of GeoInvesting.

So, for the third week in a row, and on the heels of last week’s highlight video reel of our conversation with Vittorio Bertolini, we are focusing on another professional who publishes third party content – Seeking Alpha Contributor, The Institute for Innovative Development (IID), who endeavors to be:

“…an educational and business development catalyst for growth-oriented financial advisors and progressive financial services executives who are determined to grow their firms in a business environment of accelerating business and cultural change.”

As you might expect and as conveyed by its business model, IID’s columns are intended to be learning fodder for professionals interested in the perspectives of those in networking and business activities to find commonalities across a spectrum of next-generation investment instruments.

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Investor Finds Value in Recreational Powerboats Company [GeoWire Weekly No. 70]

In concert with one of our favorite themes of highlighting compelling content from other investors, this week I have opted to bring you another investment thesis from a peer who also focuses on micro to small cap companies.  Last week, we shared a pitch from a hedge fund that is putting stake in a money services company that it believes is grossly undervalued and whose opportunities are misunderstood or discounted by investors who think foreign bank notes don’t have a bright post-Covid future.

So, after another bout of research from “around the web”, we found an intriguing pitch from a Seeking Alpha author who wrote on a dividend-paying microcap company that designs, manufactures, and sells recreational fiberglass powerboats for the sport boat, sport fishing, and jet boat markets worldwide.

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Hedge Fund Assigns a 3-year $70 Price Target on $18 Stock in Finance Industry [GeoWire Weekly No. 69]

While perusing through Twitter, I came across a tweet that highlighted an investment letter by a long/short hedge fund based in New York, which included their bullish thesis on a company, together with its subsidiaries, engages in the money service and payment businesses in the United States and Canada, with a general increase of those activities in some select foreign countries.”

A segment of the company’s operation deals with banknotes, which are “bills” or forms of currency that one party can use to pay another party.

What caught my attention was that hedge fund has a three year price target of $70 on the stock, and it’s currently selling at $18.69 with a P/E ratio of 10.5. We’ll get into the investment thesis in a second.

It’s not often that we seriously track companies that are in finance related industries, but when the stock came across our screener in June of 2022, we couldn’t help but do a little more investigating into the fundamentals that were improving, of which success is dependent on some predominant trends in the travel sector that deals with international currency and payments.

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