2026 will be my sixth year performing reviews of the financial statements of micro-cap companies. These picks will be my fourth time announcing my annual picks to that community.
2025 was the first year where I began selecting mid-year picks, because why wait when a stock stands out to you that much. Those ones I affectionately refer to as my Seal of Approval picks. Combined, I have now announced 19 of them across three years. Ten of those picks or 53% of them went on to at least triple. An equal investment across all nineteen picks would be up a combined 419%, or a 105% average annual return.
That would also mean that you would hold nineteen microcaps (not recommended) and Happy Belly Food Group would represent over a quarter of your portfolio as the stock has gone 21x from when it was selected at a dime. Currently, I still hold seven of them.
No matter who you are, all of your micro cap picks are not going to turn out to be Happy Belly, Kraken Robotics (11x at peak), NTG Clarity (19x) or D-Box Technologies (6x since selected in February). As I was preparing to write this article over the past few days, I couldn’t help but think of a few of those picks that haven’t gone so well. Let’s face it, if I don’t bring them up, my haters sure will. That caused me to tweet the following on Monday morning. Since my annual picks are my most read articles I think it is important message.
If past is prologue then I will likely hate one of the picks I am about to discuss in about six months time. It’s a funny thing to think about right now but it happened with Now Vertical in 2023, Simply Solventless this year, and to a lesser extent Thermal Energy Group in 2024 - while I no longer hold TMG I still think there could be better days ahead. The message I’d like to convey here is I only took a small loss on one of those nineteen picks - HASH. Continuous evaluations of your microcap holdings is a paramount task - these are not set and forget blue chips.
That doesn’t mean that all of my exit decisions are great ones either. I exited Gatekeeper Systems before the big run up which peaked at 6x from my 2024 Wolf Pick, but we move on and look for the next one.
One of the things I pride myself most in is telling my readers exactly what I’m thinking, including listing concerns for any stock that I’m currently holding. That message goes out to all CEO’s as well. I may compliment you today and publicly pull your pants down tomorrow.
How about we get into the 2026 edition?