Deploying effective cybersecurity measures for your business today is a continuous, ongoing battle with cybercriminals; and cybercriminals, like conventional terrorists, have a built-in advantage. It’s asymmetric warfare – just as it only takes one suicide bomber to breach a physical perimeter, it only takes one response to a phishing email to get past conventional “perimeter-based” IT protections, and thereafter it becomes easy to roam through target networks and extract sensitive data.
We are on a quest to determine if SMLR’s pullback is presenting a golden opportunity to revisit the stock and see if it can get back to its highs, which would represent returns of over 400%!
Due to our success in experiencing nice returns through buying stocks that pull back hard, we have outlined a 7-step due diligence process to help us understand if the market is overreacting to some seemingly negative news that sent SMLR spiraling downwards.
As a refresher, our string of 10 Buy On Pullback (BOP) Model Portfolios produced returns that would dictate a release of another one very soon.
Because our next Fireside Chat is with Credit Risk Monitors (OTC:CRMZ), a countercyclical company operating in the credit risk monitoring industry, we thought it would be appropriate to once again draw your attention to a pitch session with Quim Abril, President and Portfolio Manager at Draco Global Fund, during which he presented his bullish take on the company.
As a precursor to the feature with CRMZ, we’d like to focus on 3 clips that will give you a quick bird’s eye view of why Quim is following the company and, in case you missed it, where he thinks the stock could go given a couple of scenarios.
We had a second opportunity to sit down with Cipher Pharmaceuticals Inc (OOTC:CPHRF) (CPH.TO) CEO Craig Mull and CFO Bryan Jacobs on May 18, 2023.
Recall that after having taken a deeper look in 2022 into the the valuation of the company versus its peers and some of the traits it possessed that made the company a stock that we thought warranted a live event with management, we successfully hosted a Fireside Chat with the company in November 2022.
In May 18’s Management Morning Briefing, we aimed to gain a deeper understanding of Cipher Pharmaceuticals’ prospects and how they align with our findings and past discussions.
When a stock of yours is doing well, one of the hardest things you will face is deciding if you should make a decision to take short-term profits, especially if you strongly believe the stock has much more potential in the long run. But it gets even worse. Sometimes we make decisions to hold onto stocks longer than their expiration dates because of the “what if it goes up” thoughts that creep into our minds
You want to hold it, but on the same token, you are not being fair to yourself when your discipline promotes a making-money strategy.
Now, I could have just as well started this post…one of the hardest decisions you’ll have to contemplate as an investor is to let a stock with great potential sit in your portfolio for a very long time. You have faith, after your hours of due diligence, that it will give you great annualized returns in 5, 10 or 20 years, but what if it doesn’t happen on your timeline? Would the capital that would have been made available with a more swing-style trade be better deployed in another investment? And should you even preoccupy yourself with these thoughts?
Last week, we said that we’d be addressing some of the most common shortcomings that plague investors, and provided a cursory overview of one aspect of the investment process that is often overlooked – deep research. We’ll continue with the “investor oversights and failures” theme as we move through May and June, investigating additional facets that are pain points that must be addressed to become successful.
As we continue to ruminate over the next topic, the short term versus long term investing dilemma, we thought that a good prelude to that would be to take a look at some investment scenarios that fit in with that discussion. We’ve covered the topic before, but there is much more to expound upon on the subject that might help us reach some conclusions on the best approach investors should take, or maybe even a blended approach
Personally, in the first part of my full time investing career, much of my focus was in trying to find great companies in the meat of their growth cycles, holding them through that growth cycle and then selling them when the cycles were coming to an end. It was a great formula that worked fantastically for me.
Investing mistakes are common. They are made every day by thousands of investors looking to make a quick buck on YouTube hearsay, a Twitter tip, a Reddit forum discussion or “TikTok guru” just out of college. This leads to poor choices, leaving them vulnerable to misinformation, biases, and market volatility. It ultimately jeopardizes their financial goals.
Basically, when it comes down to it, there are many corners of the internet that prey on the inexperience of new investors, or the apathy of those who don’t see the value of proper due diligence (DD) to confirm, for themselves, if a certain stock is a legitimate investment, or just one that fits within their investment style.
Failure to perform proper DD and document findings is one of the foremost failures that investors face. Unfortunately, it is not the only mistake that is often made. Others include focusing too much on short-term gains, poor portfolio risk management, lack of buy and sell discipline and emotional biases. Over the coming weeks, we’ll address some of these specifically, but today we are going to stick with the research theme since that is the one that in most cases kickstarts the whole process of finding the right stocks.
The past couple of weeks were active with live Fireside Chat and Management Morning Briefing style interviews with companies that we are watching closely, have written some detailed content on (think RFTs), and/or fill spots on our Model Portfolios.
We will continue to strongly suggest that you attend these meetings or at least view the replays, as they offer so much more information than you would glean from earnings conference calls and related press releases and SEC filings. They are an extremely valuable and integral part of our due diligence. WIthout them, it’d be much more difficult and time consuming to profile the companies given the sometimes limited information available on public platforms. It’s a no brainer.
The one we held on April 11, 2023 with a company involved in the asset liquidation and charge-off loan platform businesses, Heritage Global Inc. (OTC:HGBL), was particularly timely given the combination of our focus on bankruptcy special situations of late and the case of distressed company $NMCI that caught peoples’ attention when it rallied over 200% when it filed for bankruptcy protection that same day.
When NCMI disclosed this news, it put a spotlight on how some companies can potentially emerge from bankruptcy, sometimes cleaner & stronger than ever. Clear success is not a done deal for the company, as there are still many unknowns on how clean it will come out on the other side.