Planet Microcap 2026, watchlisting thoughts

I was at Planet Microcap in Vegas this week and met with the companies below:

I plan to do a longer write-up on NewtekOne and posted some thoughts on X on NEWT, AMNF, KINS and LGL (write-up from their investor day here).

In a three day conference, you can only watch so many presentations and schedule so many meetings, so I spent some of Friday and Saturday catching up on presentations I missed: old favorite from Vegas 2025 IDN (I think in short, story is better but valuation is worse), PDEX and KITS. A few more I have on my list to look at: RNGE, KLNG and RX.

I know many readers were in Vegas or might have some insights into some of these names - please reply to this email and let’s connect if you want to share thoughts.

This conference significantly expanded my watchlist based on investor conversations. Talking to other investors is a great channel for discovery of new names, which got me thinking more on other “watchlist expansion” channels. I am in the process of overhauling my watchlist process and here are the channels I’m trying to do a better job of tapping into:

• New SEC filings - The SEC has surprisingly good APIs. Writing a script especially in the LLM era to pull all SEC filings from the last day and then having an LLM analyze fit for my watchlist based on my investing criterion did not take long. I now have a cron that does this daily. If a company announces a buyback, goes cashflow break even, announces a new CEO or does something that could represent a change in future cash flows, my hope is I’ll always catch it if it left an SEC trail. I haven’t done this for SEDAR (I need to check out Tracktacle) or press releases / data that doesn’t flow through the SEC. Importantly, I think there are lots of good conference talks, YouTube videos and podcasts with management teams that also don’t generate an SEC filing. This whole category of “meaningful non-SEC information” is higher alpha I would think than SEC filing analysis, but you have to start somewhere. As always, if you have a good system here and are willing to share please reach out. Claude Code / Codex have really changed the game on how easy it is to spin up daily reports like this and I want to make sure I’m utilizing them well.

• Good old fashioned screens - Changes in share prices and fundamentals (and the combination of the two) will make new companies show up on a given screen with the passage of time. Screens capture new information on business quality SEC filing analysis doesn’t. They can obviously be restrictive and misleading (ex. for EPS, many great companies report EPS that doesn’t translate to FCF or have much higher FCF than reported GAAP EPS), but screens I still think are a good start for watchlist candidates. I’m in the middle of Ian Cassel’s new book Stock Picker and I like his take on screens (my SEC filing parser cron is my version of event-driven screens):

Given my flavor of investing, I’m more interested in comprehensive screens and even driven screens.

An example might be screening by market cap (sub $100m) and TTM Net Income > 0.

Initial universe 23,698 stocks; output after this screen = 1,294 stocks.

Is this useful? Yes, you aren’t screening for perfection. It’s going to give you a lot more companies to sift through, but you will potentially find some interesting situations that others would have screened out.

Examples of event-driven screens are screening for rights offerings, management changes, or insider buys over $100K. In this screen, you are looking for substantial skin in the game and transformations.

• Investor activity with digital trail - 13Ds, 13Gs, podcasts, Substacks, X, Microcap Club recent activity, etc. I firmly believe you can’t borrow conviction but I also believe someone putting their reputation on the line through a 13D/G or writing an idea up on the internet is more signal than noise.

One more thing before I wrap here - watchlist statuses is another thing I’m trying to get better at. Every investor has a finite amount of time to devote to research, so I think not duplicating work and not spending time on the wrong information is paramount. For a given name on a watchlist, I think there should only be four statuses:

• Not Started

• Researching (and a note on what the next step is, ex. “need to talk to management”)

• Rejected (with reason why and how it could get back to “Researching”)

• Bought

Not Started and Researching are the things that can be actioned, Rejected and Bought are for tracking purposes / data analytics (ex. what names did I pass on that went onto perform well, where was I wrong).

Building and researching my watchlist I think should be how I spend 80%+ of my time. I own about 15-20 stocks and I think digesting the new information that comes up is usually less than an hour of week of work outside of earnings season. It is highly likely my 15th-20th best ideas are worse than the tens of thousands of names I haven’t looked deeply into. Conferences and a daily digital process hopefully will help me find those names.