IRadimed: #59 Forbes 2023 America’s Best Small Companies

Few corners of the market have offered much safety this year, and small-cap companies have fallen even further than their larger peers. The Russell 2000 Index is down 23% from its peak last November, while the S&P 500 has declined 17% since its highest point.

That outcome is par for the course for this more volatile group of stocks, which typically underperforms entering recessions and periods of economic weakness but outperforms coming out of them. In the long run, small caps are still winners. Yale professor Roger Ibbotson and financial consultancy Duff & Phelps analyzed nearly a century of data to find that small caps have outperformed large companies by 1.6% on average every year through 2020. Fearful investors who throw in the towel now risk missing out on the rewards when the market reverses course.

“This is one of the best times to invest in small company stocks that we've seen in a very long period of time,” says Gregg Fisher, founder of global small cap hedge fund Quent Capital, which manages $1 billion in assets. “The odds historically of a huge rally off this massive decline are high.”

To find the 100 best performers that have continued to grow through the bear market, Forbes used data from FactSet to compile its annual list of America’s Best Small Companies. We screened more than 1,000 companies with a market value between $300 million and $2 billion to find 541 companies that also had positive sales growth over the past 12 months and a share price of at least $5. Financial institutions, REITs, utilities, royalty trusts and limited partnerships were excluded, as were companies that have been public for less than one year.

The ranking is based on earnings growth, sales growth, return on equity and total stock return for the latest 12 months available and over the last five years. We gave more weight to the latest year’s data in the ranking. All data is as of November 11, 2022.

—excerpt from Forbes 2023: America’s Best Small Companies | FULL ARTICLE HERE | Our Forbes Profile