I’m writing you to share a recent testimonial we received from Sebastian Krog on Twitter.
It's testimonials like this that motivates our team to keep pumping out more research. What I loved most about Sebastian’s kind words is that he is right on point on what we are trying to accomplish at MS Cliff Notes - create a great hunting ground for investors and Substack authors to find the best of breed microcap stocks.
Saving you time and getting you closer to ideas faster than you otherwise would is a primary goal of our team.
We know our goal of creating a comprehensive research platform that carves out the most promising North America microcaps out of a total universe of 10,000 (U.S. and Canada) is ambitious. But we will take it one step at a time… Just like my bodybuilder friend said to me one time when I was bitching about all the protein he wanted me to consume: “You can eat an elephant if you eat it one bite at a time.”
Right now, we track a global list of about 600 Tier One Quality stocks using a 10-point checklist. So far, 88 have passed the cut to be included in our MSM Quality Index that hit markers in our 9-point multibagger checklist. Around 70% of these stocks are in positive territory, however we’d like to push for 80%. The current average return of the Index is 42%, with 25 stocks meeting or exceeding the 💯 return mark.
Back To Sebastian Krog
Sebastian, based in Germany, is a talented microcap investor who knows his stuff. I instantly connected with part of his research process which entails trying to spot cheap companies at important inflection points of change. This is also a big part of our research process. Sebastian also manages a Substack called Treasure Hunting, which I highly recommend you follow here and support.
One of his high-conviction ideas is a stock I actually own, which we are actually thinking of adding to our Index. It’s a company called Innovative Food Holding, IVFH.
“The company is a direct-to-chef and a direct-to-consumer platform providing over 7,000 of the highest quality, unique specialty food products directly to chefs and direct to consumers nationwide, through e-commerce offerings and multichannel partnerships.”
If you like stories that qualify as high probability turnarounds, have activist involvement and are run by CEOs that are highly incentivized to see their company’s stock rise, you might want to check out Sebastian’s write up on IVFH.
As serendipity would have it, earlier today, Sebastian published his bullish thesis on brand merchandising company, SGRP. Since we published a Cliff Note (#35) on SGRP in September 2022, we recommend that you read Sebastian‘s expansive and very clear write up on the company which brings things into the current perspective of what’s going on at the company. You can read our Cliff Note on SGRP here. If SGRP gets it right, the stock should re-rate from value trap valuations to a more reasonable valuation.
Some More Nostalgia
Even though we launched the MS Cliff Note Substack in January this year, the work behind the scenes started three years ago with my analyst, Jan Svenda, and my brother, Zou.
Zou left his cozy civil engineering job in 2007 to start Geoinvesting with me to help build some of the infrastructure around the research platform.
I reconnected with my analyst, Jan, in 2020 after interacting with him during my early days heading up the research team at GEO, uncovering fraud and exposing pumps and dumps. Although Jan was into the bullish microcap narrative, he was also active in the short-selling space. So, it made sense that after doing a little part-time work for me, he joined the MSM team as our lead analyst.
If you know anything about me, you know my brain never stops thinking about new projects to take on. Our concept of MS Cliff Notes - publishing my research pipeline notes - is actually not new. Some version of an investing Cliff Note has always been part of my research process, starting over 30 years ago when I began my full time investing journey. There was a time at Geoinvesting when I put my entire research pipeline in a shared Google spreadsheet for my analyst team to record notes on.
When 2022 came around, exposing all the high flying junk stocks with horrendous balance sheets or that were reporting massive losses, I had a feeling that after 15 years of hibernation, traditional value investing in microcaps was going to make a huge and broad comeback, and stick around for years.
So, in order to quickly go through the microcap stock universe, I needed to go doubly hard on filling up on my research pipeline.
Thus, the concept of MS Cliff Notes was born. I secretly launched a Cliff Note product to about 25 Goeinvesting subscribers in February 2022. And when we noticed the market beating returns the Cliff Note stocks were delivering, we decided it was time to create an Index out of the Cliff Notes and prepare for a Substack launch.
If you are wondering what MSM stand for, it stands for:
Momentum in price
Sustainability of business
Microcap Edge
So, here we are today.
The hours the MSM team puts into finding great companies is massive. If you share our vision to create the most comprehensive quality research platform where you can find ideas for your portfolio or maybe even your own Substack, we would be delighted to receive your support so we can expand the MSM team to bring you great ideas faster and develop research process investing tools to offer at a price the everyday investor can afford.
Stay tuned for more great things.
Maj Soueidan, MSM Team Member
Thank you Maj for sharing my work