Thursday, July 17, 2008

Perritt on Micro-Caps

After a three month lag time, I received the semi-annual reports for Perritt Micro-cap Opportunities and Emerging Opportunities funds today. One statistic cited by Perritt portfolio manager Michael Corbett jumped out at me. Perritt broke down the performance of different market cap ranges within the Russell 2000 index and found that, over the 12-month period ending April 30th, 2008, the average stock in the $5 million to $295 million market cap range was down a 49.3%.

A couple of other observations from this report:

1) One of my current holdings, Vaalco Energy (EGY), was listed as one of the top ten holdings of the Perritt Micro-Cap Opportunities Fund. EGY was down today, with the pullback in oil prices.

2) One of the top ten holdings of the smaller (under $250 million market cap, if memory serves) Emerging Opportunities Fund looks interesting: Mitcham Industries, Inc. (MIND). It leases and sells seismic equipment of the sort used by oil and gas E&Ps on land and in shallow waters. The company has no debt, is trading at a little over 10x next year's earnings estimates, and has had recent insider buying, according to Yahoo! Finance. I'll have to keep an eye on this one.

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