Our friend, Bruce Campbell over at StoneCastle Investment Management knows we like to explore the lesser known companies & gives us his views for 2017 & some picks to look at. “Top down, things look good from the indicators that we follow. We saw the indicators move from defense a year ago to offence in March 2016. Then we saw the more growth indicators that we follow start to improve in the June/July timeframe. When those are strong, our performance tends to be strong and that's how things ended 2016 and the start of 2017.
That being said, the shorter term indicators that we follow are stretched here and as a result we have brought the cash levels up in the portfolios.
As far as individual companies, we continue to like Pacific Insight (PIH-t), the stock can be volatile as it is thin, but just getting discovered by the street. They have a fantastic track record of growth earnings year over year. The quarter over quarter numbers can be a little lumpy but that's where the opportunity lies. They did announce they are working with Tesla and that relationship should continue to grow.
Grande West (BUS-v) is another we continue to like. Stock has had a nice move, but if it pulled back, that's one I would look at very close. They make these 30 foot transit buses. There are a few roaming around Edmonton, but mostly on the routes outside downtown, so you may not have seen one. They just got their certification for American manufacturing so they should start to see US transit orders.
Other than that, still have lots of nice growth names. MTY-t, PBH-t, CRH-t. We have a little energy exposure in large to small cap names(ECA-t all the way to ATU-v). We have some materials in the base metals space. Overall the portfolio is fairly diversified. Two more to put on your watch list are BEW-v and MBA-t. (Bruce Campbell, B.Comm., CFA, CAIA; StoneCastle Investment Management; 20Jan17)