How do you find – and play – the junior oil exploration stocks that can be 10-baggers for investors?
These are the companies that are drilling high-impact wells that can produce thousands of barrels a day. Their success can make shareholders a lot wealthier. As I wrote in my previous article, all these exploration plays are international – and the big winners often come from orphaned stocks that get financed at a very low valuation.
Andrew Schneck submits:
Although I haven’t yet written an article about my selling strategy, one of the reasons I will sell is because my initial analysis and reasoning was wrong. With Hallmark Financial (HALL), I feel as though I made a mistake.
The latest SEC filing can be seen here. Hallmark is filing an S-3 on behalf of Mark Schwarz so he can sell up to 16.3% of the company through a secondary offering. Instead of filing a secondary offering on behalf of the company to raise new capital, HALL is filing it to allow their largest shareholder, Mark Schwarz, to sell out of up to 16.3% of his holding. It would take him a few years to do this in the public markets, where the stock trades pretty thinly, but the filing allows him to do so in a much more efficient manner. The problem is, it costs HALL money for the SEC filing and registration fees. All shareholders foot the bill for Mark Schwarz to sell part of his position. This isn’t the first time he’s used HALL like it’s his company, not every shareholder’s. He filed two rights offerings that could have been used to take advantage of fellow shareholders, and his voting rights basically control the company at this point. Although he has created shareholder value in buying control in Hallmark, I feel he will take as much shareholder value for himself as possible, even in the event of hurting others. If there’s one thing I look for in a business partner above all else, it’s integrity. Here, I’m having a little trouble trusting my business partner…
The behavior of small cap indices in the US, notably the Russell 2000 Growth Index, was one of the primary reasons we turned bullish on US equities in November 2008 and have stayed bullish ever since. The outperformance of growth stocks tells you a lot about the prospects for the economy and the primary direction of major market indices.
The Russell 2000 Growth Index has consistently outperformed all the major market averages over the last two years and it continues to show no sign of backing off on its absolute and relative performance. It has been rather amusing how, with this blatant behavioral trend, analysts have been consistently behind the “curve” with respect to their earnings estimates.
Zacks Small-Cap submits:
On January 12, 2011, Manish Singh, president and CEO of ImmunoCellular Therapeutics, Ltd (IMUC.OB), made two presentations at the Biotech Show Case and One Med Place Conference held in San Francisco, Calif. from Jan. 10-13. The main theme of the presentations was an update of the company, particularly on the clinical development of its lead candidate ICT-107 and the focus on the upcoming catalysts for the next 18 months.
Update of the Company
M.E. Garza submits:
Goldman Small Cap Research recently initiated coverage of iBio (IBIO) with a Speculative Buy rating and a six-month price target of $6.00. It appears that the research firm’s forecast has news in the segment in February that could take it to the $10.00 leveli
Goldman believes that iBio is a paradigm-changing biotech that offers investors the typical biotech rewards with much lower investment risk. The iBio model enables product development and revenue generation without the typical capital costs and multi-year approval timeframe associated with traditional biotechs. iBio owns the intellectual property and technology related to its revolutionary platform, iBioLaunch. iBioLauch enables commercial scale production of proteins using genes injected into hydroponically grown plants used to produce the target proteins. This platform is suited for use in alternative influenza and bio-defense vaccines, orphan biologics, biosimilars and biobetters, each representing market sizes in the tens of billions.
Cullen Roche submits:
There is a growing divide between small caps and large cap stocks that became quite pronounced at the end of 2010 (the last time I discussed this divergence was just before the flash crash – see here). As we all know by now, equities performed better than most expected in 2010, but the performance across various classes was dramatically different. The Russell 2,000 finished the year higher by 26.3% while the S&P 500 finished the year just 12.9% higher. That’s 2X outperformance!
If recent history serves as a guide that outperformance could be set to end. As a bull market matures large caps have a tendency to outperform. This was the case in 2005-2007. The average bull market lasts over 160% so with 92% of this bull market in the books it’s probably safe to assume that we’re nearing the mature stages.
David Fish submits:
A few days ago, I screened the Dividend Champions list of companies that have paid higher dividends for at least 25 straight years (which can be found here), using market capitalization as a primary focus. The result was a diverse selection of Small Cap and Mid Cap companies in each category – Champions, Contenders, and Challengers – that are worthy of further study.
(Small Caps are generally described as having a market capitalization (stock price times shares outstanding) between $100 million and $2 billion, whereas Mid Caps range in size from $2 billion to $10 billion in market capitalization.) But that left the question of whether there are any decent “Micro-cap” (under $100 million) companies with dividend streaks. So I decided to screen as follows:
Tate Dwinnell submits:
Much has been made of China’s monopoly on rare earth metals, supplying more than 90% of the world’s supply. With the metals such an important component to all things technology– as well as a key component in electric cars and defense systems, it’s no wonder that the rest of the world is concerned about future supply. China has long used the dominance as leverage in trade agreements, not to mention to control prices.
The scramble is on to mine the rare earth metals in other parts of the world, particularly in the US, Australia, Canada and now .. Greenland? It’s true. According to the Sunday Times UK, it’s thought that Greenland is home to the largest deposit of rare earth metals in the world. Beneath the ice and rocks of the Ilimaussaq Intrustion on the southwestern shore may lie the answer to China’s rare earth dominance. It’s estimated that the deposit could supply 25% of world demand for fifty years.
By Value in Stock Market:
Earlier, I wrote that Facebook’s (FB) IPO is becoming a sucker’s bet. On its IPO debut, Facebook started at $42, hit a high of $45 for a brief moment, and then [...]
By Steven Vincent:
Let me start by clarifying something. I am not saying that the market could crash spectacularly in the next few days and that in that event the Facebook (FB) IPO would be a [...]
By Chuck Carnevale:
There is a confluence of factors that are painting a very odd picture of current investor behavior. Common sense and a careful analysis of the market dynamics between equities and bonds today would [...]
By Sami J. Karam:
Expectations of a robust housing recovery are not well supported by US demographics.
From Bloomberg News (February 8, 2012): Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told investors and analysts in a [...]