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.

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.

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.

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.