Over the course of your stock-picking career you’ll no doubt have studied your fair share of price charts, perhaps splattered with a handful of technical indicators showing moving averages, volume, and so on. Personally, I look at hundreds of charts each week to get a feel for price action and momentum, but that’s because I have a technical background, and also because I’m a little sad.
Missed opportunities
Very often you’ll come across a company that you’d previously dismissed as being too risky, only to discover some years later that the business has morphed into a £1bn monster. As investors we often have to deal with the negative emotions that arise from such missed opportunities, those who missed out on ASOS and Boohoo.Com will know exactly what I’m talking about.
That said, we can’t just go chasing after tomorrow’s hidden winners willy nilly – that would certainly be a recipe for disaster. The trick is to separate the wheat from the chaff, the valuable from the worthless. So today I’m looking at two AIM-listed companies that I believe could turn out to be monster stocks of the future.
Fighting fraud and cybercrime
First up is GB Group (LSE: GBG), the global specialist in identity data intelligence. The Chester-based technology group helps companies and governments fight fraud and cyber crime, specialising in areas such as fraud, risk & compliance, employee screening, and customer & location intelligence.
With both governments and individual companies becoming increasingly wary of fraud and cybercrime in particular, it will perhaps come as no surprise that GBG has more-than-doubled its revenues and pre-tax profits since 2014.
A storming year
The group boasts a strong renewal stream from its existing customer base, while also attracting new, high-profile customers to its growing portfolio. I see a bright future for GBG, with the business well positioned to meet the growing demand for identity data intelligence products.
The downside is that after a storming year, the shares are trading on very high rating of 36 times forward earnings for FY2018, so I would suggest adding it to your watch list to buy on any weakness during the coming months.
Promising cancer drugs
My second offering comes from the orient – Hong Kong to be precise. Hutchison China MediTech (LSE: HCM), better known as Chi-Med. It is an AIM-listed biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing targeted therapies for oncology and immunological diseases for the global market.
Last year, global market sales of oncology drugs grew by 11% to $175.7bn making it the largest treatment area in the global pharmaceutical market, with a 17% market share. But in China, despite being home to 8.1m cancer patients, or about 20%-30% of those in the world, market sales of oncology drugs were just $7.3bn, or around 4% of the global market. This clearly indicates a huge opportunity for Chi-Med in its domestic market, as well as overseas.
Despite rapidly-growing revenues, the company is not yet profitable as funds continue to be pumped into research and development. But with a number of promising cancer drugs in the pipeline this won’t be the case for very long. The share price is riding high after more-than-doubling to £58 in the last 12 months alone, so this is another one to add to your watch list in 2018.