Byron Street Research provides independent microcap research through write-ups structured in the familiar format of sell-side equity research reports, as well as Catalyst Watch, a weekly event-driven idea generator.
With institutional-quality coverage in a retail-dominated space, our goal is to unearth undiscovered companies that are too small for mainstream coverage and have the potential to shape your financial future.
Write-Ups
A write-up is the synthesis of all your research into a concise investment note. It’s the finite description of your extensive research that highlights the most important elements of your thesis, including the potential upside if correct, the valuation framework behind it, and the downside risk if it fails to play out.
At Byron Street, write-ups are typically structured as one-pagers that mirror the format of sell-side equity research reports, isolating the critical components of each differentiated investment idea. The goal of stock pitching is to communicate an actionable idea effectively and concisely, not to deliver lengthy book reports.
Ideas typically fall into one of five categories: compounders, turnarounds, inflections, asset plays, or special situations. Coverage is initiated with a Buy rating and is maintained through earnings previews, reviews, and flash notes carrying Add, Hold, or Trim ratings, before being terminated with an Exit rating.
Each report includes a detailed financial model, built manually from scratch, which is first used to provide a deep understanding of the business and its current state economics. It then serves as the backbone for forecasting key drivers, forming a differentiated view, and deriving accurate price targets.
Why Microcaps?
Microcaps are inherently overlooked, with little or no full-time analyst coverage, few institutional investors, and limited commercial opportunities for most asset management firms. At the same time, they are undervalued and unappreciated, with significant deviations from intrinsic value offering the highest source of alpha in the equity markets.
When private investors adopt a size-agnostic philosophy, they willingly forgo the structural advantage of being able to invest in those small, undiscovered companies. In this largely neglected part of the market, a disciplined and systematic stock selection process can be particularly effective at delivering consistent, long-term excess returns.
Catalyst Watch
Every investment process begins with identifying potential investment opportunities. Analysts must have a disciplined and systematic stock detection system to ensure no opportunity goes unnoticed. The goal is to allocate capital and time to setups offering the greatest potential for superior risk-adjusted returns.
Published on Mondays before the market opens, Catalyst Watch is a weekly event-driven idea generator that hand-picks the most actionable setups in U.S.- and Canadian-listed microcap stocks, presenting them in a structured table with concise event overviews. Each entry is carefully selected following a comprehensive review of all press releases, filtering out the noise.
Beyond weekly updates and highlights, Catalyst Watch is also a searchable database, allowing you to look up tickers, events, or any keyword of your choice. Populated with hundreds of previously flagged press releases, it’s the single most efficient resource for sourcing microcap ideas.
For example, the search results for “SPCB” as of September 26, 2025 are shown below. The price evolution demonstrates that each press release presented an additional investment opportunity.
Why Press Releases?
With larger companies, you’re looking for chaos. You want to see a battle unfolding: shorts pressing, hedge funds buying, blood in the streets. In microcaps, by contrast, you want no one in the streets at all. If you want to find truly undiscovered companies, you should focus on those that haven’t been widely covered and appeared on screeners.
By voraciously reading all news releases across major press wires as part of your daily routine, you feed ideas into your research pipeline that screeners or other investors have not yet surfaced. By monitoring events and disruptions, you spot change before it becomes consensus. This is truly the only scalable, systematic, and comprehensive approach to idea generation.
The following are just some of the corporate events Catalyst Watch tracks to build a pipeline of event-driven ideas:
And the list goes on…
In fact, there are countless ways to generate ideas: attending conferences, listening to podcasts, and reading financial magazines are just a few. But by the time an opportunity is covered in these sources, the chances are it has already been flagged in a press release.
About the Author
Grew up in a family of lawyers, became one myself, betrayed them, and switched to finance. Completed a Masters in Finance and passed all CFA exams. Worked in equity research at a multi-billion-dollar buy-side institution and a bulge bracket investment bank. Now a full-time private investor, investing exclusively on microcaps.
