Another highlight of this past week was our comprehensive Fireside discussion with an executive at Muscle Maker, Inc. (NASDAQ:GRIL), a company that delivers high-quality healthy food options to consumers through traditional and non-traditional locations. Joining us was the company’s CEO and Secretary, Michael Roper, who has been in the food franchising business for 22 years. He “started off in restaurants in the year 2000 as a Quiznos franchisee out of the Chicago area.” Michael referenced his story as having been a “mailroom to the boardroom” saga that at the time culminated with him being the Chief Operating Officer of Quiznos worldwide.
On September 15, 2022, our Co-founder presented at the MicroCap Leadership Summit, an annual event hosted by MicroCapClub, a platform for experienced microcap investors to share and discuss ideas on stocks trading at valuations of less than $500 million.
He was asked to pitch a company to the Summit’s audience, so he came through with the reasons why Spar Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:SGRP) deserved to be a company worthy of a close look. The company provides merchandising and brand marketing services worldwide
He prefaced his pitch on SGRP with a little about Geo and himself, and what you may know by now to be GeoInvesting’s focus on the qualities we believe that Tier 1 Quality microcap companies should have:
We may have found an information disconnect with another company.
While we pulled the trigger right away with ESCC, it’s not always a given that we will do so with all information arbitrage plays, nor is it a given that we are entirely comfortable with going too gangbusters on our commentary, especially if it’s a company that operates in a field we are not too well versed in.
This is the case with oil field chemical company,, when on August 15, 2022, the company filed a Management Discussion & Analysis document in conjunction with its Q2 financial results. It should be noted that we missed the filing when it came out but are using this as an example of how detrimental it can be to miss valuable information. In other words, while it would have been nice to have tracked it from ground zero, we’re not sure we would have bought the stock.
We are following a stock that has something in common with an historic stock market milestone – the year 1929. The span of time between 1929 to 1939 marked a 10-year era known as The Great Depression, a protracted event that many argue had a multitude of causes, both domestically in the United States and worldwide. The US saw a major decline in the stock market, falling consumer prices (deflation) in the midst of a major shift in product manufacturing techniques, joblessness, and an eventual slowdown in global trade that brought commerce to a fraction of what it once was just years before.
Ironically, we are now following a manufacturing company that was incorporated the very year marked by the beginning of the Depression. (although it was technically founded in 1880). If you think about that for a second or two, it’s not often you can find a company that has been around for 140+ years.
As you may know by now, our first criteria in our tier one quality microcap checklist is “long operating history.”
Fitlife Brands Inc (OTC:FTLF) is a manufacturer and marketer of nutritional supplements for health conscious consumers in the United States and internationally. We’re going to start watching FTLF a little closer due to the contents in a mid-year shareholder letter that the company issued in a July 8k in conjunction with its December 2021 year end results.
You can see our prior coverage on FTLF here. GeoInvesting research contributor, Avram Fisher, published his bullish thesis on July 29, 2016 at a price of $3.45. We subsequently published a ‘Reasons For Tracking (RFT) piece on the company on November 23, 2018 at a price of $1.38 (report prices adjusted for splits – 1:10 on 4/16/2019 and 4:1 on 12/8/2021).
For you on this labor day, keeping with our promise to break out the stock pitch clips from Maj’s discussion with Quim Abril, they are now available for viewing. Extracted from the August 29, 2022 Podcast between Maj and Quim are segments on…
We believe that stock ideas coming to fruition, especially as a direct result of many of the tenets we use to evaluate the fitness of an investment, are the bright spots when the pervasion of negativity slams the market. These tenets, or as we like to call them, Tier One Microcap Criteria, are at the core of our discoveries in the microcap investment arena. Maj and our new GeoInvesting team member, Sanjay Amarnani, discussed the top 10 of these criteria in detail.
We are in the thick of the calendar Q2 earnings season. This 2022 quarter in particular is a bit of an anxious one since we want to see many of the companies we cover start to follow through with hopeful statements they might have made several quarters back while covid disrupted business operations across the board.
Investors are getting weary, and as some larger cap companies are leading the way in what seems to be a stealthy market recovery, it could be an indication that this success is a macrocosm of things to come across the board.