As an investor, if you spend the majority of your time looking at larger cap companies, it is truly hard to appreciate the wacky and bizarre things that happen in the microcap world. What is great about smaller companies is that they are quite often underfollowed (or virtually unknown) and misunderstood. That means the opportunity is evergreen for an investor who is willing to perform deep due diligence, accept illiquidity risk, and concentrate on his/her best ideas. On the flip side, the issue is that a lot of things can happen that are not on your spreadsheet. That can either encompass totally unexpected events that impact the business in a material fashion or weird occurrences that arise when you are trading the stock.
With all of that as a backdrop, Eugene and I recently had the opportunity to talk about the opportunity we see in the U.S. microcap investing with Bobby Kraft of the Planet Microcap podcast. The discussion covered a lot of topics, including our lessons learned over the last 10 years. However, the most fun, entertaining and eye-opening stories surrounded Bill Miller (of Legg Mason fame) jumping in front of Cove Street to buy a sub-$10 million market cap stock and our previous investment in Simulations Plus (ticker: SLP).
I highly recommend taking a listen, at very least just to hear the wild Bill Miller story (starts about 23 minutes in).
You can access the audio here. And enjoy the video below.
Disclaimer: There are a couple of instances of salty language within this podcast.