[00:03:03] Paul Andreola: Hey, good to see you, Kyle. 

[00:03:05] Kyle Grieve: We spoke on the Millennial Investing Podcast back in my first ever episode with TIP, and I’ve learned a heck of a lot about small caps since that interview.

[00:03:12] Kyle Grieve: So today I wanted to get into the weeds a little bit more about your strategy with small caps from the buying process to monitoring your businesses, to figuring out what to sell. So to kick it off, you like getting your small caps business at a discount. After all, you publish a biannual report for your subscribers called Cheapies with a chance.

[00:03:28] Kyle Grieve: So let’s start here and discuss the evaluations you look for in potential investments. 

[00:03:33] Paul Andreola: Okay, well first off, we start by flipping over as many rocks as we can, the old Peter Lynch adage. And what that means is we go through CDAR filings up here in Canada and there’s 2,700, roughly twenty-seven hundred public companies.

[00:03:46] Paul Andreola: And we have a certain criteria we look for. And predominantly the criteria really fits best for sort of call it the small caps or even nano caps. We’re looking for companies that A, are profitable, right? Which will distinguish themselves significantly from a lot of the other, small companies that are out there.

[00:04:05] Paul Andreola: But then there’s other factors that we look for and typically we’re looking for things that are sort of growth in nature, right? We want to see small companies who grow into big companies. That’s where, historically or at least my experience. I found the biggest value is in finding these mispriced growth opportunities at a small scale that, that the institutional investor or, sort of the call it the bigger investor cannot participate in even if they recognize it.

[00:04:29] Paul Andreola: So we’re trying to find those characteristics that I’d almost describe it, that a fund manager will buy but can’t because it’s too small. And that’s growth, that’s profitability, that’s, there’s some other factors or capital structure and things like that, but the big driver is growth and profitability.

[00:04:47] Paul Andreola: If you can just find those type of companies. You’ve really, well A, you’ve gotten rid of about eighty-five other or 85% of the rest of the market. But you’re finding those companies that have that potential to really turn into major wins. And I know that 

[00:05:00] Kyle Grieve: you like, obviously like you just mentioned because the institutions can’t enter into the fray here, you obviously get these massive mispricing.

[00:05:08] Kyle Grieve: So because you are dealing with smaller ones, do you have any specific parameters that you use in terms, let’s just say in terms of PE or say, enterprise value to earnings that you won’t go above? Are you always looking to try to stick below a certain number or how do you view that?

[00:05:22] Paul Andreola: Well, not really. Look, a faster growing company deserves a higher multiple. So what we’re really looking for is less, less a defined number in terms of price to earnings. We’re looking for what we call a PEN ratio. So a lot of people would know what that is. A price, earnings over growth ratio.

[00:05:39] Paul Andreola: So the faster growing company deserves a higher multiple, right? So I’ve done very well buying, stocks that are trading at 30, 40 times earnings. If those companies are growing at a hundred percent or more, then you can justify that. And then there’s companies that you could buy at eight times earnings that are declining in revenue.

[00:05:59] Paul Andreola: And I wouldn’t touch those because that’s a melting ice cube as far as I’m concerned. So you have to be a little bit more flexible. And quite frankly, the good ones, the hyper growing companies tend to get a higher valuation anyway if people are properly paying attention. So yeah, I use a PEG ratio, which I can talk to if you want that.

[00:06:18] Paul Andreola: That’s really the driver in terms of what we think Something’s cheaper now. 

[00:06:22] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. Would you mind just going over a quick case study using the PEG ratio for the listeners to better understand it? 

[00:06:27] Paul Andreola: Sure. I’ll give you a real world example of a company that we found called mid last year in thermal energy.

[00:06:33] Paul Andreola: I think you might even know it. So here’s a company that was growing at about 70, 80% a year, and when you look at its earnings, you could model up pretty quickly to see it was trading at about 10 to 12 times earnings. Some might think 10, 12 times a week is not super cheap, but when you sort of layer in the fact that it was growing that fast, you’ve got a PEG ratio that is sub one, like significantly sub one.

[00:06:59] Paul Andreola: Anything below one is typically viewed as inexpensive, and anything above one is considered expensive. So what you do with the PEG ratio, and there’s two variations of it. You take the rate of revenue growth. Okay. The actual, the real version is you take the rate of earnings growth on a per share basis.

[00:07:19] Paul Andreola: So if a company’s earnings is growing at, let’s say a hundred percent a year, it’s doubling its earnings every year, and the stock is trading at 20 times earnings. You have a 0.2 peg ratio, and that would be considered cheap. Now what we do is we actually take a little bit, even more conservative approach.

[00:07:36] Paul Andreola: We take a the revenue rate of growth and then use that as the factor. So if we do that, what tends to happen is your earnings growth rate is usually leveraged, so it grows even faster than that. So if we can find something that’s growing its revenues at 60% a year and trading at 20 times earnings, then we know we’ve got an extra buffer because likely that earnings is growing at a hundred, 150% a year.

[00:07:59] Paul Andreola: So that’s what we look for. And because we are, we go through all the companies out there, we can sort of rank all the different companies against each other. And what we’re trying to do, and this is what we do with the cheapest of the chance, is we’re trying to find the best or the cheapest based on a PEG ratio.

[00:08:15] Paul Andreola: And then we add in the fact that if we can find something that’s sub-fifty million dollars market cap, we know that it’s even likely more mispriced or more or call it less discovered. So that’s what we do. And you just described the cheapest of the chances. 

[00:08:29] Kyle Grieve: So I know that you you just talked about how you like to go and look at every single business in Canada each year, and so I know in mid twenty-twenty-three, you said that the exact number was, I think about 14% of the businesses in Canada were profitable.

[00:08:43] Kyle Grieve: Now, I know you’ve done, I think you’re working on one right now, so I’m not sure how far along you’ve come, but can you share what number of Canadian businesses right now are profitable? Is it the same thing or is it higher or lower? 

[00:08:54] Paul Andreola: It’s roughly the same. It’s been an interesting market over the last several years.

[00:08:58] Paul Andreola: What, typically what happens is when the market gets, healthy and frothy, you get a whole bunch of new companies that come in, right? Companies that are, a little bit more speculative, they’re looking for capital. They’re newer businesses and they’re not as likely to be profitable.

[00:09:13] Paul Andreola: So you start to get that number ballooning and the percentage of profitable companies actually goes down. Now the flip side too, and kind of what we’re seeing right now is some of the really good profitable companies are actually getting bought out, so that’s slightly driving the number down as well.

[00:09:28] Paul Andreola: But historically the number doesn’t vary too much. So yeah, it’s roughly the same as what we saw mid-last year around the, well it 13 to 15% of all the companies listed in Canada are profitable. And that we take a subset of that because we want to find profitable companies that are growing as well.

[00:09:46] Kyle Grieve: So one of the major issues that investors have with small caps is that many have very short histories from which to form conclusions. So at a decreased risk, I think many investors just simply stay away from micro caps specifically because of this factor from your history in small caps, what have you noted are the biggest risks to an investment going south, and how do you minimize the impacts of these investments?

[00:10:06] Paul Andreola: That’s probably the most important question an investor has to ask themselves is really what’s the downside and what’s the risk? I can talk about how we mitigate our risk when we’re buying, the, these small companies. First off look if you’re buying a profitable company, you’ve really significantly de-risked that investment opportunity, right?

[00:10:25] Paul Andreola: I’d almost go back and say almost every major mistake I’ve made was in expecting too much of a company that wasn’t profitable. And so if you’re looking at de-risking yourself as much as possible, stick with profitable companies. That it also sort of, it mitigates the financing risk that’s possible as well.

[00:10:45] Paul Andreola: And the, there are kind of two different things you gotta watch out for. One is risk of failure to the business. So that means yes, of course a, a proper company will still have risks and you may end up with, a competitor that comes in and just kills them or a regulatory change or something that you can’t really foresee.

[00:11:02] Paul Andreola: That’s a standard business risk that you, it’s very hard to prevent. The biggest thing you do to sort of mitigate that is buy with a big margin of safety, right? So if you’re buying it cheap enough, you’re kind of mitigating that business risk that’s so hard to predict. But if you’re buying a company that likely has to finance, especially if it has to finance to keep the operations going, that’s where you add a high degree of risk and we call it dilution risk or financing risk.

[00:11:29] Paul Andreola: And we try to avoid that at almost all costs. Now if markets are good, if capital markets are healthy, then yeah, they can keep going back and raising money. And as long as the sort of that opportunity’s still there, they’re fine, right? Or at least the business is fine. The problem you have with that though, is it’s diluting your ownership in the business.

[00:11:49] Paul Andreola: It’s not necessarily risk to that the company’s going to go to zero, but it completely dilutes your ability to see a significant gain, right? So if you’re constantly getting diluted. It almost prevents the upside from materializing, right? So I’ve seen a lot of experience, and this happens a lot in the mining space, where you see these companies, they go from a $20 million market cap to a billion dollar market cap, but this, the price has never moved.

[00:12:15] Paul Andreola: If you were a shareholder, you’ve never made any money. Even though the value of the business is growing, that’s because they’ve issued, millions and millions of shares. So for us, what we want to do it’s like anything you want to de-risk everything you participate in and still maintain upside.

[00:12:28] Paul Andreola: So for us, we look for profitable companies that takes away that, that risk that something could materially go wrong quickly and all of a sudden that they’re out of the business. We watch for the balance sheet. Obviously you have to, you want to see a balance sheet that call it healthy debt is a four-letter word.

[00:12:47] Paul Andreola: You gotta watch out for debt and. If a company has taken on too much debt, that clearly increases the risk. But so if we’re happy with the balance sheet, then it really becomes a function of if it’s profitable, what are we paying for? And the bigger the margin of safety the more risk we’ve taken out of the equation.

[00:13:07] Kyle Grieve: I really like your takes on financing because it’s not something that you hear talked about a lot and I know you know a lot about it and you’ve researched it a lot. So you recently wrote, quote, going back to the market for funding can be very expensive. For instance, raising 1 million in shares is not the true cost of financing.

[00:13:23] Kyle Grieve: When conditions are challenging as they are now, you can get bad shareholders who know they have the upper hand with a company that serially dilutes selling and driving down the share price. There’s also considerable cost involved among the leadership team who spent significant time hunting for money.

[00:13:38] Kyle Grieve: Then there’s commissions on financing, legal and accounting fees, sweeteners like warrants an IR firm and more. The result could mean getting a bad price on new share issuance, requiring even more shares and excessive number of warrants, which means even more shares. So in a perfect world, you’d probably just love to see a business that can self-fund its day-to-day operations, as well as its growth, if that’s the direction it’s going in.

[00:13:59] Kyle Grieve: But since that luxury is often reserved for a lot larger mature businesses, I’m interested in knowing how, what your general strategy is for assessing specifically the funding in specific businesses and understanding what’s a good situation versus what’s a poor situation. 

[00:14:13] Paul Andreola: One thing that we look for and we think is vital to any company that’s, well, I’d say any company period, but more importantly to small companies and especially companies that are likely going to have to go in finance.

[00:14:25] Paul Andreola: Is you want to see somebody ideally on the board of directors that has capital markets experience, and ideally they have a vested interest in that company, meaning they’ve got a lot of shares in that company. And why that is because the capital markets are, the financing part of this industry is cutthroat and it’s deadly, right?

[00:14:43] Paul Andreola: If you don’t owe what you’re doing and you’re going out there raising money, you will get scalped like you wouldn’t believe. So you need to have somebody on that board that understands the dynamics of the industry and knows how, you know what a good deal looks like and what a bad deal looks like, and how to go and get a good deal when you go and raise money.

[00:15:00] Paul Andreola: So having that helps out quite a bit because you’re right, the cost of going out and getting money is not just the commission that gets charged. Typically there’s a discount to the trading price. It can be upwards of 20 to twenty-five percent. A lot of times they have to add sweeteners like warrants.

[00:15:17] Paul Andreola: And broker options, and there’s a number of other things. And yes, it’s costly for management to have to go out and especially if they have to do this on a regular basis you’re taking away from the operations of the business. So all these things are factors that come in and all of a sudden when you do the math from a shareholder standpoint, yeah, okay, they’re raising a million bucks.

[00:15:36] Paul Andreola: Yeah, maybe they paid 7% in cash commission. So theoretically you’re getting 93 cents on the dollar, but it’s being done at a 20% discount to where your shares are and your man, the management team’s taking their eye off the ball, and they may have lost the customer because they were spending their time getting this stuff done.

[00:15:54] Paul Andreola: You also get. If anybody sniffs a finance incoming, you tend to see the stock price get hit. And usually when a company is going out to raise money, they’ve gotta go and test the waters. So the minute they test the waters that the potential for that sort of news to leak is out there. And that’s when you start to see the real pain as a shareholder.

[00:16:16] Paul Andreola: That they’re going to have to suffer because of these financing. So it’s never black and white, right? There’s always way more costs, and again, a reason why we try to avoid those type of situations as much as we can. 

[00:16:28] Kyle Grieve: So one thing I’ve noticed with a lot of these nano caps is the a bit, when they kind of, when they’re in their infancy and they’re, not profitable at all, they are going to the markets and issuing equity to raise funds for their growth.

[00:16:39] Kyle Grieve: But then a lot of them, if the successful ones, the ones that you are looking at, become profitable and they’re able to kind of just eliminate or not, maybe not fully eliminate, but heavily decrease the amount of share issuance that they need in order to grow. I’m interested in understanding more about the inflection points here.

[00:16:55] Kyle Grieve: Like what are the capital markets or banks looking at from these nano cap businesses that will allow them to get more comfortable with them actually giving the money rather than just taking shares in the business. 

[00:17:06] Paul Andreola: The nice thing is when you’re a public company, you’ve actually gone public likely to go and raise money, right?

[00:17:11] Paul Andreola: Equity capital. What you want though, is you want as many options as possible to go and raise money when you need it. And the problem is, until you’re able to prove to the bank that you can actually pay that money back, they’re not likely to go give you any debt. So you’re stuck with this situation that I can’t go talk to the bank until I’m cash flowing and making money, because otherwise they’re just either going to charge me an arm and a leg, or they just won’t give me the money.

[00:17:37] Paul Andreola: So you need to see companies that actually have the wherewithal to pay back that cash. Then the other key thing to remember is, okay, now what is the bank actually lending against? I. I’ve been involved in situations where if it’s a software company, it’s very difficult to get a bank to lend money because there’s no hard assets.

[00:17:54] Paul Andreola: You’re basically the collateral is an income or revenue stream that if it disappears, there’s nothing left to go and chase. I. Whereas if it’s a company that produces hard goods or needs machinery or things like that, there typically is, an asset they can collateralize. So you’ve got, let’s say you’ve got this piece of machinery that’s generating revenue and something goes wrong, that revenue disappears, the bank or the lender can go after that asset.

[00:18:20] Paul Andreola: So it kind of depends on the type of company. If you’re a company that has hard goods that you can use as collateral, then you’re more likely to get debt. Even before you’re cash flowing. Whereas a software company, you’re unlikely to get debt until you’re cash flow. So those are the things to look for.

[00:18:39] Paul Andreola: Now, you still have to have proper capital allocations. Somebody in the business has to sit there and say, okay, yes, we can get bank debt, but our share prices are so high that it makes more sense. Action, do equity or vice versa. So you don’t want to just go and get bank debt because it’s there. And sometimes you don’t want to just go get equity because it’s there.

[00:18:58] Paul Andreola: You gotta know how to work a calculator, right? You gotta know how the results will be if you take on that type of that kind of capital. 

[00:19:05] Kyle Grieve: So you said before, quote, none of my 10 plus beggars ever sold out of swans. They were all some form of ugly ducklings. Learn to love micro calves with fixable problems, unquote.

[00:19:16] Kyle Grieve: So this is an awesome quote and it’s somewhat at odds with what Warren Buffett famously said, that which is turn around, seldom turn. I’m interested in learning more about what potential problems, micro caps face that you think are the easiest and most value-accretive problems for shareholders and people in management to solve.

[00:19:33] Paul Andreola: I’d never like to say I’m disagreeing with Warren Buffett, but actually I think, so we don’t actually buy a lot of turnarounds, right? We buy companies that have something wrong with them, but typically it’s something wrong with the optics or maybe even the capital market side of things, right? I’m not a huge fan of turnarounds.

[00:19:50] Paul Andreola: I’m a huge fan of companies that have hit, maybe they’ve struggled over time, but they’ve actually fixed that thing and now they’ve hit that inflection point. Most of my, swans. Were companies that you know, had to really struggle for a period of time and then somehow found something and it clicked and things started to go, I can go back in all my major wins.

[00:20:11] Paul Andreola: I know they had some struggles, right? I. So we’re actually looking for things that are more optics, right? So why is this company not trading properly? Why is it not trading the valuation it should, and it’s usually, maybe they have extremely poor IR. Maybe they have a balance sheet that looks ugly because of some of the legacy issues, but their income statement is fantastic.

[00:20:33] Paul Andreola: Maybe they’ve had to change management and now this new management has righted the ship. Those are things that, they’re all great, but they show up in the financials, they show up in that sort of criteria that we look for. And yeah, you might say they basically have already gone through their turnaround and now we’re just able to buy at a discounted price because the market hasn’t figured that out yet.

[00:20:55] Paul Andreola: A friend of mine’s got has got this term he uses it’s information arbitrage. We just found that information before somebody else did and we can put in place and put a value to it. 

[00:21:06] Kyle Grieve: And I know that a lot of like just, I’ve looked at a lot of the businesses that you’ve looked at too, and a lot of times it’s not necessarily even Yeah.

[00:21:14] Kyle Grieve: That they don’t see my turnarounds. It just feels like they’ve, maybe they’ve gone through some unnecessary or short-term headwinds. Like Covid, for instance, was a big headwind for certain businesses. Then they get punished for it, which maybe it’s fair. And then now that Covid is over, they’re kind of unleashed again.

[00:21:30] Kyle Grieve: But the market, like you said, with that point, that they don’t realize things quite as fast, especially in these micro caps. They just don’t see it. So you can definitely find some incredible opportunities there. 

[00:21:40] Paul Andreola: Exactly. That’s, it’s exactly what we look for is that, companies that were sort of wrongly put in the penalty box.

[00:21:45] Paul Andreola: We try to identify when they’re coming out and we jump on it as soon as we can. 

[00:21:49] Kyle Grieve: So in our first chat you discussed averaging up and you had really emphasized how much you love doing it. One of the examples that you used was Bowflex, which is now Nautilus as an example, that you should have been buying even more of, even as a price increased.

[00:22:03] Kyle Grieve: So for some value investors listening, they might be horrified by the concept of increasing their cost basis on a stock, but I’m interested in getting a better understanding of when and why averaging makes sense for you. 

[00:22:15] Paul Andreola: Exactly. It’s, I’ve got the experience of doing it the wrong way to to work from, really what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to always have an understanding of what you think the value of the business is and trying to buy it below what that value is.

[00:22:30] Paul Andreola: Now, if it’s a growing company, that value theoretically should continue to increase. Ideally along with the price, but sometimes the price doesn’t properly match it. So what you’re doing is you’re trying to, make sure you still have that margin of safety. As that value is growing and that share price is either, growing with it or perhaps not growing fast enough to meet value.

[00:22:52] Paul Andreola: So we’re constantly measuring that. Like we don’t blindly buy just because it’s going higher, but if the value is increased significantly and we feel there’s still that margin of safety, we’re in there, continue to buy. Now the thing to be careful too, is that like we have to measure that against all the other opportunity costs that we have, right?

[00:23:10] Paul Andreola: So we’re going to look at that opportunity and if it’s looking fantastic and still better than anything else we can find, then that’s the impetus to continue to add to that position. If it’s growing and the share price is going up, but we’re finding something that’s better, then we’re unlikely to add to that position.

[00:23:28] Kyle Grieve: And so when you’re, when you are averaging up, I assume you’re, it’s the same kind of thing, I guess you’re just updating your PEG ratios and if the if the PE is low enough, but then the growth is still high enough, then that’s kind of where your opportunity is? 

[00:23:38] Paul Andreola: Yeah, I usually, when we get heavily involved in a company we’re going to really understand it well enough.

[00:23:44] Paul Andreola: So some cases, we’ve seen it recently with another company, the allowance, a contract, for example. And we’ll be able to really understand quickly how much that contract is going to impact the value. And if we think the market hasn’t properly respond to that’s going to drive us to be buyers again.

[00:23:59] Paul Andreola: So it doesn’t necessarily have to be that their growth rate every quarter is showing up and it’s higher, and we’re waiting for that. We’ll see other potential value drivers that we’re going to jump on. And a big part is because we understand the business so much and we know that, look, if they land a $2 million contract, what kind of impact should that have on value?

[00:24:16] Paul Andreola: That’s what we do. We really get under the hood and understand what’s driving it and why, when we think it makes sense. 

[00:24:22] Kyle Grieve: And what’s the most you’ll average up by cost basis in one position as a percentage of your entire portfolio? 

[00:24:28] Paul Andreola: You know what? There’s no set. What I find that the best investors out there don’t have sort of preset parameters around that sort of stuff.

[00:24:34] Paul Andreola: What they do is. They look at every case on a case-by-case basis, right? So if all of a sudden some company has doubled its value based on some material event, that shouldn’t prevent you from dramatically increasing your percentage ownership now, especially if you have the confidence that’s the best opportunity for you out there, right?

[00:24:55] Paul Andreola: Again, the exercise that we go through of looking at so many companies gives us comfort that we’re ideally buying the best four or five opportunities that we think we can get our hands on. And if there’s a change in the value of that business, it shouldn’t have, well, based on my experience, it shouldn’t have that much of a difference in terms of what you decide to do with it in your portfolio.

[00:25:18] Paul Andreola: What’s it called? Recency bias or agency bias? No, that’s not a recency bias. But because you own 5% of that company or 5% in your portfolio. If all of a sudden it’s the most obvious opportunity for you, you have to go and increase your position in material way. You can’t sit there and say, no, I already own my 5%.

[00:25:36] Paul Andreola: I can’t buy anymore. Based on that rule, it’s just like the best investors in the world don’t do that. Again, Warren, Buffett, there’s so many examples of him and that adage, when it rains gold, you don’t put out a symbol. You take out a wheelbarrow or a bucket or whatever you want.

[00:25:51] Kyle Grieve: So I know that you aren’t a huge fan of averaging down in the majority of circumstances. You wrote a really good analogy why that is, quote, if you personally lent someone money and they only repaid you half of what they owed you, would you give that person more money? Of course not yet. We continually do this with our investing where we average down into things that have a history of disappointing us unquote.

[00:26:11] Kyle Grieve: Since many of the businesses that you look at are often overlooked for extended periods of time, it would seem that averaging down can sometimes make sense if the business is increasing value at a quick rate, but the price has decreased. So I’d just love to have your thoughts on averaging down and when you think it is.

[00:26:26] Kyle Grieve: It does make sense. 

[00:26:28] Paul Andreola: You’re right, we rarely average down. Now we do try to get to know these companies as well as we can, and there’s really two distinctions, right? There’s a value and then there’s a price. So the value, we try to understand the value as much as we can. So if for some arbitrary reason the price goes down, yet the value has not changed.

[00:26:49] Paul Andreola: We see that from time to time for different reasons. An institution has to sell or some investor has to sell. Maybe even an insider has to exercise options or sell for whatever personal reasons. When we see that sometimes there’s a negative. Sort of, sentiment towards the company.

[00:27:05] Paul Andreola: And we try to balance or understand, does it make sense? And if it doesn’t, then that’s a case where we might look at it a little bit differently and say, okay, yeah, the share price is down. It does make sense to buy it here. The value hasn’t changed. In some cases, the value’s improved, and yet we’re seeing downturn because of circumstances that not reflect in the business.

[00:27:25] Paul Andreola: That’s when we’ll look at something like that. But if it’s just down on price and we can’t substantiate, the value, if the value has gone down as well along with the price, then quite frankly we actually started looking at selling rather than looking at adding to position, we can go and buy something else, right?

[00:27:41] Paul Andreola: That’s always the driver. We’re going to go and find something that just gives us more confidence and gives us what we’re looking for. 

[00:27:47] Kyle Grieve: As Charlie Munger once said, quote, I’ve always believed that nothing was worth an infinite price. So now we’re, I’m looking more here at what you’re going to do with something that you’ve already held that’s gone up in price a lot.

[00:27:57] Kyle Grieve: So my question for you is, at what point are you thinking it’s time to sell a position based purely on evaluation decisions? 

[00:28:04] Paul Andreola: We talked about the pay grade show before, right? So that’s usually if when we look at a company in isolation, it becomes. There’s two reasons to sell. One is the valuation actually has exceeded sort of that pay grade ratio.

[00:28:17] Paul Andreola: That one then it becomes, almost becomes an automatic sell. Or if the business itself is broken down, so let’s say all of a sudden it stops growing or there’s a material event that that we think is destroying value or impeding value that automatically makes us a seller. But quite honestly, for the biggest reason we tend to sell something is because there’s something else that’s much more compelling.

[00:28:41] Paul Andreola: So yes, this stock maybe is trading at 0.9 of PEG ratio. It’s not perfectly valued. It’s, it’s gone up and we’re happy and all that sort of stuff. But now we’re finding another one that’s trading at 0.2 times PEG ratio, and it’s less discovered in a whole host of things that we look for. Then it becomes a situation where you could say, okay, we’re going to start allocating capital from here and start moving it over here.

[00:29:03] Paul Andreola: So that, that tends to be the biggest driver of ourselves. Again it’s handy to be able to look at everything because it, everything in investing is really a function of opportunity cost, and that’s a big function of it right there. 

[00:29:15] Kyle Grieve: I’m just also interested, so obviously a lot of these companies that you might get, let’s say, using the example you just used, when it gets to a 0.9 PEG ratio, it might still be doing really well and the fundamentals might be going at a good place.

[00:29:26] Kyle Grieve: Because of that, are you usually fully exiting positions? Once it hits something and you have another use for the money, are you just fully exiting or do you usually like to leave a little bit in there? 

[00:29:36] Paul Andreola: It’s pretty rare that we fully exit, like again, if something goes wrong, right? Yeah we’re looking to fully exit as fast as we can, but if they’re still sort of executing, they’re still creating value, all the right things are still there and it’s just a function evaluation, then we’re less.

[00:29:52] Paul Andreola: Sort of urgent, it’s less urgent to sell, right? We’re a little bit more patient. The thing you have to factor in too is the whole idea of taxes, right? Because if you’re going to turn over then you get tax consequences and that, that actually mitigates your gains. So holding a good, long term winner, that gives you confidence, you have conviction in it, pays to hold on a longer time there, even if it’s fairly valued.

[00:30:17] Paul Andreola: So that, those are all considerations that we have to use, but we rarely sell our whole position when something goes wrong. Partly because, if it’s grown to a sizable amount, it may be very difficult to sell that and redeploy all that capital all at once anyway. So you’re better off sort of slowly selling off.

[00:30:33] Paul Andreola: Look, it’s I dunno if it’s like your children or your wife or something like that, you don’t never, you never want to give up on them. Like kind of, they’ve done the right thing. You don’t necessarily want to give up on them. That conviction is important. You’ve come to understand that business.

[00:30:47] Paul Andreola: Therefore, the new opportunity has to be very compelling to be willing to give up all that sort of comfort and that need. 

[00:30:54] Kyle Grieve: So I’m interested in knowing more about your strategy when a business decreases in growth. So we talked about when it’s still going good, but now let’s look at when something decreases in growth.

[00:31:02] Kyle Grieve: So let’s go through a quick hypothetical. A business meets your stringent criteria for entry into your portfolio. You had a few good quarters of profitability growing well above twenty-five percent in, revenue and per share earnings. And you averaged up to, let’s say a high single digit percent of your portfolio by cost basis, but now growth.

[00:31:19] Kyle Grieve: What needs to happen to get the alarm bells kind of ringing that are telling you to sell or to wait longer? 

[00:31:25] Paul Andreola: Yeah, so it depends on how much it’s changed, right? If it’s gone from, 60% growth to 30%, we may not sell it at all. It might still justify owning it if it’s gone from six 50% down to 5%.

[00:31:39] Paul Andreola: Then it’s a function of selling it when you can. Now, some of the issues around micro caps is that liquidity becomes a consideration. So if it’s not very liquid, you’re limited in terms of how fast you can sell at a reasonable price. Anyway. Let’s assume you’ve got liquidity and you can sell again the driver’s going to be, what are you going to do with that cash?

[00:31:56] Paul Andreola: Is there still a margin of safety in owning it right now? Probably or probably not. And that, that I, that’s going to be the other thing that’s going to decide if the stock still looks real cheap, even though the growth rate has come down as much. Then I’m not as anxious to sell unless I’ve got that other opportunity.

[00:32:12] Paul Andreola: So much goes back to what can I do with the resulting cash and that’ll determine how fast I’m going to sell this. 

[00:32:20] Kyle Grieve: So you mentioned recently that some of your legacy positions were causing a bit of a drag on returns in 2023, even though you had a few very high performing stocks in your portfolio. So I know exactly the pain of carrying legacy positions and what that could do for your overall results.

[00:32:35] Kyle Grieve: So I’m interested in knowing what are some of the key insights from your experience in investing that help you best deal with legacy positions? 

[00:32:43] Paul Andreola: Usually if you decide to sell, you sell. I think everybody has that one stock or maybe a handful of stocks where you sit there and go, yeah, it still has that chance, right?

[00:32:53] Paul Andreola: What if I just wait a little bit longer? Experience should have taught me better that once you’ve sort of started the process, it’s almost impossible to stop and the best thing to do is to sell and use not just that physical currency, but the mental currency. This business is so much about psychology and sort of mental applications that why have something that’s not working for you and is an eyesore and makes you cry every time you think of it.

[00:33:19] Paul Andreola: Why haven’t your portfolio get rid of as fast you can move on to something else. There’s an old adage that an old broker I used to work with used to give me, it’s easier to give birth than it is to raise the dead. So if you’ve got a stock that is dead, get rid of it. Go find something else.

[00:33:35] Paul Andreola: Go give birth to some other opportunity. That’s my motto now. But still, I’ve gotta put it a lot more in practice than I have. 

[00:33:42] Kyle Grieve: Yeah, in 2023, I really focused on that and, I had a few, everyone has holdings that they just look at and every time you look at it, it just feels like the news is bad.

[00:33:50] Kyle Grieve: They’re just not doing what they’re supposed to be doing or what you thought they were doing. And it’s just it’s like a mental drain and a strain just to own it. And then, so basically I had a few positions like that and I literally just got rid of them. And granted, it, unfortunately, I got rid of, I think all, I got all three of them at a loss.

[00:34:04] Kyle Grieve: But it makes investing a lot more enjoyable, a lot more fun. And like you said, right? There’s always an opportunity out there and a lot of times if your businesses aren’t performing well, you’re better off just going and find a business that is performing well. 

[00:34:18] Paul Andreola: What should always ask yourself is when you’re holding that stock, ask yourself if you truly believe this is the best investment opportunity that you have access to.

[00:34:26] Paul Andreola: And if the answer is no, well the answer should, the results should be, I’m going to sell it and go find that better opportunity, right? That’s what we do day in, day out, is just constantly assume that there’s something better out there and we look for it. 

[00:34:38] Kyle Grieve: So I know you talk to many public businesses just on your day-to-Day life and for SmallCap Discoveries and industry experts also.

[00:34:45] Kyle Grieve: You talk to a lot and have tons of really good friends in the investing community. So I’m interested in knowing how you’ve built up such a good network and how that network has improved your investing. 

[00:34:55] Paul Andreola: Yeah, a great question. I think, I’ve been at this now for about 30 plus years, so a lot of it’s just, accumulating experiences, both good and bad.

[00:35:03] Paul Andreola: I think it’s really vital, especially when you’re in investing in microcap spaces to get to know the players. There’s, I understand the system too, right? We talked about financing in the past, and how important is to understand how that works and who the players are and what can go wrong, what can’t go wrong.

[00:35:22] Paul Andreola: Accumulating in network investors is really important because, you can’t expect to know everything. You can’t expect to know everyone, right? So a lot of times I’ll phone up somebody who may know, the management team over here or in this other business, and all these little clues are things that are going to help build your conviction, build your understanding of the business.

[00:35:42] Paul Andreola: So it’s important you reach out. It’s important that you ask questions. And I think the other thing is. I find that a lot of people, especially in the microcap space, well Craig frankly, even in, investing in general there, there’s a lot of people that are willing to give back and help people who are starting out and answer questions and, in some cases, mentor, young people who are trying to build their network.

[00:36:03] Paul Andreola: Those things are really important and you can fast track your learning by getting in front of as many people as you can and ask them, right? Yeah, sure. Some are going to say no, but get out there and talk to people. Ask them. Ask them what their experiences were, ask them for help. You’d be shocked know what people’s motivation is as well, right?

[00:36:22] Paul Andreola: This is an industry that, typically people get paid for either information they get paid for doing things. Understand that help when you can understand that, some are looking for payment for things and just get out there. Get out to conferences, ask questions, phone companies.

[00:36:39] Paul Andreola: Micro caps are the type of companies where if you pick up the phone and try to talk to the CEO, you’re likely going to be able to talk to them. You’re not going to be able to pick up the phone and talk to the CEO EO of Google or, I think your answer be pretty low. So get out there and start that, and then after a while you’ll find that your network starts to actually work for you.

[00:36:57] Paul Andreola: Ideas will be shared, different bits of information come back and forth. And then that’s what this business is all about.

[00:37:03] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. One thing I’ve really noticed, just honestly from doing this kind of same kind of things you, you say, which is, asking other people for help and, reaching out to people, asking questions and contributing to other people is that once you start getting a network of people who really know you and like you and who’ve, who you’ve helped before, people just share ideas with you and it’s awesome.

[00:37:21] Kyle Grieve: because these are people who know you, right? It’s not if I came up to you and were like, oh, hey, paul, I got this really good idea, it’s called Apple. It’s okay, well I know you well enough that you have zero interest in that idea. So you’ll get people who know you and know your investing style and know the types of investments that you look at.

[00:37:37] Kyle Grieve: And it, it’s powerful and it can really help with efficiency too, right? Like if, obviously you, I know you do all the work your own and you’re probably not relying on other people for too many ideas. But it helps when you have other people who can kind of steer you in the right directions with just saving time.

[00:37:51] Paul Andreola: Immense amount of time is saved by having the right people. And look, there’s, it’s impossible to know everything. Real world examples, there’s companies that we’ve looked at the life science space, so pharmaceutical space, and we know people in the industry now through, our relationships in the past.

[00:38:05] Paul Andreola: And when we have a tough. So question or something we need to understand we’ll reach out and sure enough they know what we’re all about and they’ll gladly help when they can. That’s the beauty of this sort of stuff is that nobody in this, on this planet knows all the information and you reach out and you have people that are willing out.

[00:38:22] Kyle Grieve: Small caps have historically outperformed all other deciles of the market and with how much of a run the Magnificent seven had in 2023, it seems that perhaps capital may once again flow to small caps, but who knows? It does seem like it’s taken a long time for Microcaps to have their day in the sun.

[00:38:37] Kyle Grieve: I’m interested in knowing, what are you seeing in the market today that makes you bullish on small caps for the future? 

[00:38:42] Paul Andreola: The market is made up of all different stocks, right? So I’m a believer that value always does well when I say value mispricing. So if something is growing and it’s not properly priced, that over time that’ll perform and do well.

[00:38:57] Paul Andreola: I’ve seen sort of over the last two years, I’d almost call it two different markets. You can even say three different markets. The big stocks for sure. And the indexes and the stocks that everybody knows they’ve done exceedingly well. Then you get the rest of the market. And I’ll call it the smaller companies within the component.

[00:39:15] Paul Andreola: There’s, I break it into two different pieces. One is the profitable growing smaller companies and then everybody else. If you look at the small companies as a group, yes, that’s performed quite poorly over the last two years, especially in comparison to the big guys. If you look at the small and growing profitable companies, they’ve actually done really well, like really well.

[00:39:37] Paul Andreola: Three different kind of markets to look at. If you look at the whole thing, you go, okay, well market kinda looks okay. It doesn’t look too bad if you’re just playing in these sort of money losing small companies. You’re going, oh my God, it’s been terrible for the last two, three years. But then if you’re that other sandbox that I love to play in.

[00:39:53] Paul Andreola: We’ve had a fantastic year last year. As a matter of fact, we’ve had two fantastic years when everybody else has been complaining about the small company. Now going forward, what I think is interesting is that more and more people are starting to figure it out. We’re starting to see a little bit more bigger capital come down market, and they’re starting to distinguish between those two.

[00:40:12] Paul Andreola: Sort of smaller markets. The small companies that we look at that are profitable growing, they’re not as cheap as they used to be, right? So we’re not finding as many, no brainer opportunities as we did two years ago. So that means capital is coming in, but it’s nowhere near the kind of capital we’ve seen in prior sort of bull markets for small companies.

[00:40:30] Paul Andreola: So I think there’s a tremendous upside for these small and growing micro-cap companies because that institutional capital is just starting to trickle down market right now. And when it does, you get a real euphoric bull market. Now, the other market, that money-losing market now, I know the industry institution, institutional players and investment bankers need to eat and they have to go and generate revenue for themselves.

[00:40:54] Paul Andreola: And the way they do that is through financings. So I do think you’re going to start to see. Know, the last two years there’s been absolutely almost zero IPOs in financings. But you’re going to start to see that research, in my opinion. I think you’re going to start to see the whole smaller market is actually going to do significantly better than it’s than the last two years.

[00:41:12] Paul Andreola: I think the profitable growing companies are going to continue to do very well because of that capital coming down market. But I think some of that capital’s going to go into that sort of the more speculative area as well, and I think that’s going to buoy the whole market. If I were a hedge trader and I could hedge the big markets I’d be selling the big markets and going along the small markets because I think there’s a huge historical mispricing of those two assets right now.

[00:41:36] Paul Andreola: Historically, small stocks always traded a premium to big stocks, and now we’re seeing the opposite. 

[00:41:43] Kyle Grieve: Yeah, one thing you mentioned there that the last two years for you guys have been really good, even though you know the market broadly speaking for small caps hasn’t been good. So I looked at like the performance of some of your cheapies with a chance over the years, and it’s pretty incredible how it just always seems to do really well.

[00:41:59] Kyle Grieve: So it seems almost like it doesn’t really even matter if, you’re not getting a huge influx of money into these small caps. It just seems like because the businesses that you’re look at looking at are really cheap, you just need a couple of eyes on it and that can generate returns even in the presence of a market that isn’t necessarily conducive to success.

[00:42:18] Paul Andreola: Okay, so a couple things to unwind, right? Institutional investors, typically in Canada they look at companies, at the earliest stage, usually about $50 million market cap. You really have to get to about a hundred million dollars market cap before the real institution money starts to play.

[00:42:33] Paul Andreola: What you want is you want to find a company that maybe it’s a $40 million, maybe 50 million mark or whatever, but if it’s growing and it continues to grow, sooner or later, it’s going to get to that size and it’s going to show up on the radar screens of these institutional players. So that’s the beauty is if you can find those companies that are doing the right things sooner or later, just a function of time.

[00:42:51] Paul Andreola: Now, sometimes what happens is. It’s not a function of time, it’s a function of the sentiment in the market and it improves. And all of a sudden these guys, instead of, using $50 million as their cutoff point, they start coming down to 20 and $30 million. They come to the market and they generate it.

[00:43:06] Paul Andreola: So it’s just a function of time. It can happen over a couple years, or it can happen very quickly if the sentiment starts to change. And like I said, we’re starting to see the sentiment change right now, so we actually think we’re going to get that lift that has not really shown up over the last two, three years other than just these companies we’re growing.

[00:43:24] Kyle Grieve: And so during times like this where ideas are just a lot harder to come by, I follow obviously a lot of the businesses that you follow and the prices have gone up quite a lot and a lot of them and they don’t look quite as attractive as they once did. Are you usually just kind of just staying in the positions that you have and letting them run?

[00:43:42] Kyle Grieve: And maybe you’ll give them a little bit longer of a leash because there’s less opportunities like you, you said with opportunity cost because there’s maybe less opportunities out there, you’re just more likely to let them run and see what they’re going to do for the next few quarters.

[00:43:53] Paul Andreola: Thankfully I’ve been around this business for a long time, and what I recognize is as much as they’ve gone up, they haven’t gone up to what they typically trade up. We look at these businesses and yes, they’ve done well. In some cases they’ve doubled or tripled in the span of the last year, but they’re still not close to where their valuation should be in a normal market.

[00:44:10] Paul Andreola: The other thing I learned very early on in my career is that, especially in Canada, the Institutional capital that’s out there really drives the markets. It’s not the retail market, it’s the institutional capital, and there’s a massive amount of institutional capital out there. Now when they really come to play, it has a dramatic effect on share price.

[00:44:30] Paul Andreola: So the stock that might have been trading at 10 times earnings, that it doubles in price because it’s grown and multiple, has expanded to 20 times. You’re sitting there going, my God, I’ve tripled my money. But then alone comes an institution and sits there and says, oh boy, if this keeps doing this for five years, this thing is the tin bagger from here.

[00:44:48] Paul Andreola: So now they actually go in and they price it even higher. So we have not really seen that take effect yet. These stocks that even though we’re not finding as many great opportunities, they’re still good opportunities. When that institutional capital comes down, you’re going to see another, we call it a, another discovery point in the discovery cycle.

[00:45:07] Paul Andreola: And that institutional discovery cycle is the most impactful and the fastest driver of change in share price that you can imagine. So yes, we sort of complain that we’re not seeing as many good opportunities. But the opportunities we have, we’re still highly convicted that institutional capital, when it comes down, it’s going to have a material impact on share price.

[00:45:27] Kyle Grieve: That institutional discovery process that you just discussed, is there like a general duration that lasts for or is it just basically completely dependent on, market forces and There’s too many variables to think about? 

[00:45:39] Paul Andreola: There’s a number of things that impact it, right? So we’ve had a rough market in Canada and a rough market for small caps in Canada in general.

[00:45:46] Paul Andreola: So a lot of, there’s not been a lot of capital going into these institutional small cap investors. So they’re kind of playing with a certain amount of cash. Now, there are issues around what they can and can’t do in this environment. If a small company is not liquid enough for these institutions to buy them, they can’t buy them.

[00:46:04] Paul Andreola: Now you get a bull market, you get two things happening. There’s more capital that goes into their portfolios, and more of these companies become liquid. So you get those two effects starting to impact, and all of a sudden they’re playing ball. So that is yet to happen. That’s what I’m talking about.

[00:46:20] Paul Andreola: When those two things happen, you have this bloated amount of cash that has to squeeze into a small supply of companies because that’s all there is. There’s just not enough. I remember there was a time when we did a little bit of a study and there were more small cap funds in Canada that than there were companies that they were qualified to buy.

[00:46:40] Paul Andreola: So you have this weird dynamic that as soon as a company hit a certain inflection point and was doing the right things, you had 20 of these funds would jump in all at once. And of course that would drive the share price like crazy. I think we’re about to see that again. 

[00:46:52] Kyle Grieve: Paul, thank you so much for coming onto the show today.

[00:46:55] Kyle Grieve: Where can the audience learn more about you in SmallCap Discoveries? 

[00:46:59] Paul Andreola: Well, first off, Kyle. Thank you. I it’s always fun to talk to you. I love this stuff. You can see, I can talk for hours and hours, but anybody interested, they can find well, they can find our service at smallcapdiscoveries.com if anybody’s interested.

[00:47:10] Paul Andreola: We’ll give them a free trial if they’re, if they mention you and your service. Also, you can find me on Twitter. I’m crazy Twitter poster. So I’m there @PaulAndreola and yeah, and if they reach out and they’ve got any questions regarding anything around this sort of stuff that we talked about and happy to answer and help how I can.

[00:47:29] Kyle Grieve: Okay folks, that’s it for today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I’ll see you back here very soon. 

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