Two Cheap Little Microcaps
A Durable Family Business. A Classic Net-Net.
Stock 1:
Extremely durable 200-year-old business
A decade of profitability and dividends
Premium niche brand with steady, non-cyclical demand
Stock 2:
Market cap covered by cash
Zero debt
Trades below Net Current Asset Value
After graduating from Columbia Business School, 21-year-old Warren Buffett spent his days at a small Omaha brokerage firm flipping through the Moody’s Manual.
Thousands of pages of financial data on every listed company.
He read them cover to cover. Twice.
Why? Because hidden among thousands of stocks were tiny, illiquid businesses trading at absurd discounts. Stocks so small that institutions ignored them completely. Stocks where a little research could uncover life-changing opportunities.
From 1952 to 1962, Buffett compounded his net worth at 48% a year by finding these forgotten names.
That kind of mispricing still exists today, just not in the large caps everyone’s watching.
The two stocks in today’s write-up are exactly the kind of businesses Buffett would have circled in his Moody’s Manual.
Two tiny, illiquid, overlooked businesses.
One is a profitable net-net trading for the amount of cash on its balance sheet.
The other is a super-durable family business with a century of consistent earnings and dividends.
Both have extremely strong balance sheets with no long-term debt. Both trade at cheap valuations. Both are run by aligned owner-operators.
They’re ignored simply because they’re too small for institutions to care.
But for individual investors willing to do the work, that’s exactly what makes it interesting.