The only reason to leave the relative safety of index funds behind and pick individual stocks is the disciplined pursuit of market-beating returns.
This pursuit, backed by often tedious due diligence, seeks to identify companies with potential strong enough to stay invested, no matter how volatile shares get, thanks to the high-conviction data you manage to uncover. This is no easy task, especially compared to owning a global stock ETF and calling it a day, requiring that your research process be sound from step one.
While each investor will approach the stock market in their own special way, we’ll go ahead and suppose that due diligence begins with finding companies whose products or services are differentiated from competitors, granting them at least the potential for long-term shareholder value creation.
In the newest edition of Stockhouse’s Weekly Market Movers, I’ll go over two micro-cap tech stocks tracking companies in the early stages of disrupting multi-billion-dollar industries.
Visionstate
Our first micro-cap stock pick this week is Visionstate, a technology developer focused on solutions in the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and analytics.
The company’s flagship technology, Wanda, is a turnkey solution for facility cleaning management, allowing users to track frequency, duration and effectiveness and make more data-driven resource allocation decisions. Optional components to foster client and constituent trust include smart people counters, a public alert system and QR code functionality for customer feedback.
The ability to monitor staff in real time, for as little as $250 per month, offers governments and businesses a way around the facility wear-and-tear, compliance violations and loss of reputation that can result from inefficient cleaning practices, granting Wanda a privileged position as a value optimizer in the growing US$415 billion cleaning services industry.
Wanda is complemented by Visionstate’s recent expansion into AI models and auditing and inspection management software, as well as the debut of WandaLITE, a simplified version of the company’s flagship product to help the thousands of businesses affected by Ontario’s newly introduced Bill 190 mandating easy public access to restroom cleaning records.
Despite a growing list of potential clients, including multiple municipalities, a major Canadian university, a prominent health authority and a national janitorial service provider, investors have yet to recognize the company’s value-added facility management technology.
Visionstate stock (TSXV:VIS) has given back 66.67 per cent since 2020, las trading at C$0.02 per share.
PlasCred Circular Innovations
Our second micro-cap company worth your scrutiny is PlasCred, an emerging plastic waste recycler vying for industry leadership with the help of first-mover, patent-pending technology, which has been proven at pilot-plant stage to convert up to 80 per cent of unsorted waste plastic into renewable green condensate.
This condensate can then be used to produce virgin plastic, transportation fuels or pipeline diluent, offering industry players a new catalyst towards minimizing a major source of global pollution, and offering the company multiple global industries to generate revenue streams, pursue growth, gain pricing power and progress on its path to profitability. To this end, PlasCred has secured strategic partnerships with CN Rail, Palantir Technologies and Fibreco Export to bolster operational intelligence and logistics support.
The company estimates that it could go from nil to C$15 million in revenue as soon as 2026, with a plan in place to ramp up condensate production from an initial 500 to 10,000 barrels per day over subsequent years. PlasCred has already taken the first step in this direction, signing its first supply agreement with a global commodities company – fixed price of C$120 per barrel of condensate over five years – incentivizing ongoing engineering work towards its first production facility. Troy Lupul, PlasCred’s president and chief executive officer, sat down with Lyndsay Malchuk to discuss the agreement. Watch the interview here.
Sitting at a 90 per cent loss since inception in 2023, PlasCred stock (CSE:PLAS) has lost the thread when it comes to its underlying company’s near-term cash flow and global appeal in a world drowning in plastic.
Should revenue start to scale, look for a swift re-rating, as the company’s potentially profound effects on the environment begin to take shape.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next week for a new edition of Stockhouse’s Weekly Market Movers. Here’s last week’s article, in case you missed it.
Join the discussion: Find out what everybody’s saying about these micro-cap companies with billion-dollar aspirations on the Visionstate Corp. and PlasCred Circular Innovations Inc. Bullboards and check out Stockhouse’s stock forums and message boards.
This is sponsored content issued on behalf of Visionstate Corp. and PlasCred Circular Innovations Inc., please see full disclaimer here.