Small Cap Talk: Flowtek Industries

I usually don’t dwell much into small cap company investments, but one exception is Flowtek Industries (FTK). Flowtek is a supplier of drilling products to the energy and mining sector. Their core business revenue comes from specialty chemicals that they sell to the oil services industry. These specialty chemicals help soften up the hard layers in the earth that prevent oil and gas companies from extracting the most amount of oil out of each oil well. Some of their big name customers include Schlumberger (SLB) and Haliburton (HAL), who uses Flowtek’s drilling products.

The reason for their dropoff from a high attained in October of $55/share to their current valuation of around $17/share is due to two straight quarters of missing analyst expectations. They missed expectations by $0.02 last quarter and $0.05 the previous quarter. Four analyst currently expect a $0.32 per share earnings during their next earnings release and a 39% increase in revenues in the same quarter from the previous year.

With oil prices at an all time high, Flowtek is poised to be able to rebound in the next half a year and should show some promising results as their specialty chemicals are their bread and butter product.

Notable Signs of Rebounding

• 2 analysts have initiated this stock as a buy in the last 2 months
• 3 straight years of increasing operating cash flow (note this company has been around since 1983)

What May Keep it Down

• they have missed earnings two quarters in a row and being a small cap company, may take longer to recover toward beating estimates
• any negative news hurts small cap companies much more than larger companies

All in all, I believe a lot of downside has been factored in and it’s a good opportunity to make 20-30% easily (especially at entry levels below $15). I have made 30% on Flowtek in the last month and so can you! I currently don’t own shares in Flowtek.

1st Year Stock Portfolio

It has been just over a year since I’ve been investing seriously in stocks; and I’d like to recap how the market has treated me and what I’ve learned over the last year.

1) Know When to Take a Loss
Every informed investor should be aware of the overwhelming problem in the subprime mortgage market that has tumbled over into the prime mortgage sector, homebuilders, and consumer spending. For a little over 2-months, I owned Accredited Home Lenders Holding Company (LEND). LEND melted down to a low around $6/share but is currently still far from their 52-week high of $36.95. Luckily I saw the negative signs early and took a minor 10% loss. If I had held until today, I would have realized a 60% loss. Some people will not want to write down a loss, but sometimes you have to figure out why a stock is down and understand if it has the fundamentals to rebound or not. In the case of Accredited Home Lenders, I didn’t see any kind of foreseeable stabilization in the housing market and I got out.

2) Ride Momentum For Big Gains
In my Las Vegas Sands investment, I got a 72% gain in just under three months and I rode the stock to new yearly highs. Instead of pulling out with a 10-20% gain, I saw the positive signs of their Venetian Macau opening, Singapore hotel casino in the works, and other investment options. Of course, I would have been up 90% if I had held it, but another thing you have to do to be a good investor is be happy with your gains, and don’t let it affect other investments. Even when LVS dropped 20 points in mid August, I knew they had good fundamentals and global growth opportunities and I wasn’t in any rush to sell.

3) It’s Hard to go Wrong With Oil/Energy
I made a lot of trades with oil and coal companies, and those companies would have provided me with even better overall gains if I had held them longer. With oil at an all time high and staying in the $80/barrel range, it is only time that is standing in the way of $100/barrel oil. Unlike technology that can get outdated, oil is not being replaced soon by any other commodity.

4) Diversity is Difficult
I truly believe that it’s extremely difficult to have a completely diversified portfolio of stocks unless you have at least $30,000 to invest. That way, you can invest in $3,000 blocks and have no more than 10% of your portfolio in any one stock. If you only have $2,000, that can buy you 2 shares of Google and 7 shares of Apple. On top of that, each stock represents 50% of your investments. Never put all your eggs in one basket so even if you have less than $30,000, at least try to invest in different sectors. As you can see in my stock investments below, I had investments in oil, coal, retail, housing, casinos, ethanol, and technology.

5) Just Make Money
For young investors, go ahead and take those short-term capital gains. Don’t worry about saving taxes by holding your stocks for more than a year because who knows if you’ll even have a positive return later. If you make a 10-20% gain in a few months, I would take those gains so you have a cushion before dipping into another investment. It is also a very good psychological boost to know that you are making profit.

My investments dating back to as far as September 2006 are shown below. I have provided information on the short term capital gain or loss that I incurred. I also included the current gain or loss I would have if I had held the stock until today.

Company	Ticker Symbol	Actual Gain/Loss	Current Gain/Loss
Hot Topic	HOTT	04.23%	-25.15%
Sandisk	SNDK	02.10%	-07.17%
Peabody Energy Corporation	BTU	03.93%	35.80%
Peabody Energy Corporation	BTU	09.05%	42.48%
Statoil	STO	08.34%	41.66%
Statoil	STO	14.75%	50.05%
Peabody Energy Corporation	BTU	09.19%	38.91%
Qualcomm	QCOM	00.89%	13.61%
SAIC	SAI	03.20%	02.77%
Halliburton	HAL	08.37%	32.91%
BJ Services Company	BJS	00.55%	-10.48%
Qualcomm	QCOM	00.89%	13.61%
Finisar	FNSR	06.27%	-22.89%
Accredited Home Lenders	LEND	-10.17%	-60.34%
BJ Services Company	BJS	12.13%	00.90%
Las Vegas Sands	LVS	71.81%	90.07%
Archer Daniel Midlands	ADM	03.79%	03.79%