last updated
What is a small cap stock? Should you invest in small companies? Why these businesses may offer great opportunities for individual investors.
More Investing Articles
Investing During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Every company is different, but investors often group them by various characteristics. They may all share the same market, perhaps producing steel or supplying medical insurance. Others share the same type of industry, such as producing consumer goods or financial services.
Every public company has other, less obvious things in common: size, value, and financial characteristics. While you can't directly compare things like P/E ratio of two companies in different sectors or industries, you can compare companies of similar sizes and valuations.
For example, thirty of the largest American-based companies (sorry, Canadians!) are in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. You won't find a small company worth only dozens or a hundred million dollars there; these companies are worth billions (see Apple Computer or Exxon Mobil). Similarly, the S&P 500 market index contains the 500 most valuable companies, in terms of market capitalization, traded on US stock markets.
What about smaller companies?
What Makes Market Capitalization "Small"?
You can imagine three ways of dividing stocks based on how much the market values them (the number of public shares outstanding times the value per share). The Dow and S&P 500 members have large market capitalizations. They're huge. In the middle—midcap stocks—are found on the Russell 2000 index. They're probably worth more than a couple of billion dollars, but they're not enormous global conglomerates.
A small cap stock is a publicly traded business with a relatively small value. As you've figured by now, small cap is short for small market capitalization. There's no single definition for small cap, but the range tends to be more than a couple of hundred million but less than a couple of billion.
That describes a lot of businesses.
Should You Invest in Small Cap Stocks?
A good stock is a good stock. An undervalued stock is an undervalued stock. You can make money buying Coca-Cola stock at a good price and you can make money buying Willamette Valley Vineyards at a great price.
Keep in mind what you're buying, though. Coca-Cola is an enormous company with cash reserves and financial options to weather a couple of bad years, while one or two bad years might just sink a small winery. Also remember that millions and millions of people own Coca-Cola stock and millions of shares trade hands every day, while only a few thousand winery shares get bought or sold. Getting into and out of a KO position is much easier.
Is Investing in Small Caps Risky?
Most stock performance studies concentrates on the big behemoths: the Coca-Colas and IBMs of the world. Why not? They're worth a lot of money, they have lots of shares traded every day, and they make huge revenues.
Yet because they're so widely studied, they're rarely undervalued. They offer few surprises. They're often good stocks to own (they make a lot of money, after all), but they rarely provide good value investing opportunities.
Small caps are less attractive to big institutional investors. For example, a hedge fund worth $400 billion could buy a Canadian maple syrup company worth $200 million outright, so SEC guidelines are very strict about what mutual funds, hedge funds, and ETFs can and can't own (and how much). Small caps also have a lot less stock liquidity. There aren't as many shares available: a company worth $200 million might have a price of $20 per share and 10 million shares outstanding. It makes no sense to have 200 million shares outstanding, because then each share would be worth only $1 apiece, putting the company into penny stock territory.
Individual investors face a little more risk in investing in a small cap: it's not as easy to buy or sell (due to less liquidity) and there's less information available from other investors and analysts about the company and its financial position. Yet the benefits may be tremendous.
What are the Rewards of Investing in Small Companies?
Fewer analysts looking at a stock means fewer people trying to take advantage of an underpriced stock, so if you're confident in your ability to identify mispriced stocks, finding small companies to invest in can be worth your time.
Better yet, smaller companies can more potential to grow than larger companies do. It's a lot easier to take a company from a $1 billion valuation to a $2 billion valuation (an easy two bagger situation) than it is to take a company from a $1 trillion stock to a $2 trillion stock. Not all small cap stocks have this opportunity, nor do they necessarily have the financial management to do so—but every large company on the S&P 500 started as a smaller company.
Finding Small Caps
Where do you find these small cap public companies? You could look at any stock screener and set your market capitalization to any stock worth less than $2 billion. Alternately, look at small cap indexes such as the S&P 600 which focus on these smaller businesses.
The important point isn't looking at any arbitrary threshold for inclusion. Rather it's more important to look where most people aren't looking. If that's in the $100 million range or the $1 billion range, so be it. There are more good opportunities and great businesses out there than any one person can research and invest in.
As always, do your homework. Know your appetite for risk and understand what you're buying. Yet also know this: if you're really looking for mispriced stocks and opportunities to buy a good company with a lot of potential at a great discount, small cap stocks can help you build wealth in the stock market.
← How to Invest $1000 in the Stock Market | Are Annuities Good Investments?→