We opened this Skull Session by catching up with Hugo Navarro (@HugoNavarroPer2) after meeting him in person at Planet MicroCap Las Vegas. Hugo discussed his move into advising a fund in Spain while continuing to publish on Substack, where he focuses on undercovered small-cap ideas.

Hugo described his approach as both bottom-up and top-down, with a focus on cheap companies that often trade below five times free cash flow and still have growth optionality. He also explained how sharing research online helped him build relationships with fund managers, gain access to management teams, and eventually move into fund advising.

This Skull Session featured Deiya Pernas, an investor at Pernas Research, for a conversation on investing process, information arbitrage, AI, portfolio construction, and small-cap opportunities. The discussion opened with Deiya’s path into investing, shaped by poker, understanding, probabilities, emotional control, and decision-making under incomplete information.

This Skull Session builds on the short selling theme with John Sutter, Esq., who joined us to unpack the Andrew Left conviction. John has worked with whistleblowers and short activists and now spends much of his practice helping financial market participants reduce legal risk.

In this Skull Session, we are bringing back Sean Westropp of Deep Sail Capital (@DeepSailCapital) to discuss the current short-selling environment. The timing was useful because we have also been tracking our own zombie-style basket of lower-quality companies, while Sean has been spending more time writing publicly about short setups and short squeezes.

We hosted a Skull Session Fireside Chat with Rhone Resch, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of $TOYO, on May 27, 2026. The session was co-moderated by GeoInvesting research contributor “Jev” (@MicrocapDr), who brings two decades of energy economics experience to the discussion, and was coordinated with the help of Crocker Coulson of AUM Advisors, who serves as investor relations support for the company.

This week’s Skull Session was a real special one for us. We brought in Dean Pernas, co-founder of Pernas Research, alongside analyst Lukas Milosic (@Pixelresearch_ on X) for what turned into another wide-ranging, genuinely useful conversation we’ve been having on Skull Sessions.

Dean is a chemical engineer by training who spent five or six years at companies like Monsanto, Schlumberger, and Procter & Gamble before making the jump to full-time investing alongside his brother in 2020. Together, they launched Pernas Research in 2023, and what immediately sets them apart is something you don’t see often in the research shop space: a fully audited track record going back to 2017, verified by a third-party auditor.

The returns speak for themselves: multiple years of strong double-digit outperformance, including a 105% year in one of the more productive stretches. They invest their own money, write about what they own, and publish everything transparently.

Lukas (@Pixelresearch_ on X) brought up something I’ve been thinking about too: the idea that average holding periods have compressed from roughly six years to six months, and the argument some high-profile microcap investors have been making that short-term investing is simply the better approach. Lukas wasn’t buying it as a blanket rule, and honestly, neither am I.

We opened this week’s Skull Session with Derek Webb, President and Chief Executive Officer of $BIRMF (TSXV:BRM), to review Q4 2025 results and discuss how the company is positioned heading into 2026. The session also marked the first appearance of Lukas Milosic (@Pixelresearch_ on X), a private investor and author of the Pixel Research substack, who joined us to ask questions.