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The #1 request Cabot has had over the years has been to find great stocks sooner and with our publication Cabot Small-Cap Confidential, we’re able to do that. Cabot Small-Cap Confidential, a limited subscription newsletter, focuses on finding undervalued and little-known small-cap companies that are poised to break out in a big way. Or, I should say, the publication’s analyst and editor, Thomas E. Garrity, is able to find winning stocks sooner. His long career and varied experiences taught Tom to make investments only when the potential rewards outweigh the risks. He applies this philosophy to every stock he recommends in Cabot Small-Cap Confidential.

Successful investing is not about being wrong or being right, it’s about making money. And the best way for a growth stock investor to make money is to watch the market very carefully, to understand what its actions reveal about the thinking of the big institutional investors who move the market, and then to act accordingly.

Prohibition led to the system of alcohol transport that persists today, a system dominated by distributors and the states, which are primarily concerned with taxation. This makes it difficult for small vineyards to ship wine around the country. On the investment front, my advice today is to put your money into one of the distributors. After all, they’ve got the power and you can benefit from it as an investor. But the distributor I like is not in the U.S.; it’s in Poland and Russia.

This month we are going with a small industrial company that is showing how consistent focus on operational improvement can pay dividends.

Once thought of as a highly cyclical company with management that tended to drop the ball, execution has improved dramatically. In 2022 revenue was up 14% and EPS was up 41%.

With exposure to megatrends like infrastructure and global electrification, I see more upside ahead.

Enjoy!

Stocks are on track to post gains for July as Explorer recommendations have a good week with new pick Centrus Energy (LEU) up 20% followed by Cloudflare (NET), up 15%. Now, we head to Germany for today’s pick.

This is the million-dollar question: With incoming data anything but straightforward the Fed is trying to thread the needle ever so gently to guide the economy down to a soft landing.

Industrial stocks are hot. So today we’re jumping into a small-cap precision‑engineering and motion‑technology company that has both a self-help and an improving end-market story.

This company has spent the past several years transforming itself from a niche motor supplier into a vertically integrated engineering platform. After a strong start to 2025, it looks like 2026 will be even better.

All the details are inside the February issue of Cabot Small‑Cap Confidential.

Halfway through January and one of the big stories of the year is the continued outperformance of small-cap stocks. Along with the strength in the equal-weight S&P 500 (the Invesco S&P 500 EW ETF (RSP) is an easy option to track this), this is part of the “market is broadening out” theme that you’ve likely been hearing about.

As I stated several times in the waning months of last year, small caps benefit from (1) an early cycle backdrop, (2) stabilizing earnings revisions, (3) positive operating leverage, and (4) lower rates. These conditions are materializing right now. Analysts expect small-cap earnings to grow 15% in 2026, only slightly ahead of the 14.8% expected for large caps but a massive improvement from the small-cap earnings contractions in 2023 and 2024, and above the expected 2025 earnings growth rate of 13.4%. By the way, mid‑cap earnings are expected to grow by 19.3% in 2026. This is helping to draw more attention to the small and mid-cap (SMID) asset class, which is actually what a lot of small-cap ETFs and mutual funds really have exposure to.

Both the S&P 600 SmallCap Index and the Russell 2000 are trading higher than they were a week ago, making the ugly selloff last Friday look like a one-off event.

That said, it’s totally valid to be at least a little concerned about the trade war heating up again. And while it sounds like progress could soon be made in the government shutdown (Senate Majority Leader Thune is rumored to be talking with Democrats about extending ACA subsidies in exchange for reopening the government), there’s little doubt that the longer the shutdown goes on the greater the risks are to the market.

In the market, it’s not the news that counts, but the market’s reaction to the news—and that makes last week’s trading noteworthy: Middle East attacks along with a dockworkers strike (that was quickly put off for a few months) could easily have sent risk-on assets reeling, but instead, most indexes took the news in stride and, somewhat surprisingly, we’ve seen defensive stocks hit the skids. Now, to be clear, there are still flies in the ointment out there, including the possibility of a counterstrike overseas (rumblings of that today), rising Treasury rates, and a lot of indexes, sectors and stocks are still rangebound. There’s no question there remain many stocks that act well (including tons of Top Ten names), but we’re staying in the same stance as we wait for upside confirmation from more of the market—we’re encouraged, but we’re leaving our Market Monitor at a level 7 as we wait for the buyers to truly flex their muscles.

This week’s list is another one with something for everyone in terms of stories and setups. Our Top Pick is a firm that has its hands in many nuclear power cookie jars; the stock just emerged from a multi-month rest on big volume.