2024
America’s Most Successful Small-Cap Companies
EDITED BY ANDREA MURPHY
AND HANK TUCKER
NOVEMBER 10, 2023, 06:30 AM
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    hile it’s been a banner year for trillion-dollar companies like Apple and Amazon, small-cap stocks are still stuck in a prolonged bear market. The Russell 2000 index tracking small companies is down 2.8% this year, compared with a 13.8% gain for the S&P 500, and small caps remain 30% lower than their 2021 peak.

    “If you’re the small-cap growth manager at the proverbial cocktail party, as soon as you turn to walk away, the guy’s whispering to his wife, ‘he must be a masochist,’” laments Laird Bieger, co-portfolio manager of the Baron Discovery Fund.

    High interest rates and slowing consumer spending have made this year an uphill battle for small caps, but Bieger and his peers can point to numerous metrics indicating that small companies are trading at a bargain relative to historical levels and should outperform in the coming years if the economy picks up steam again.

    To help investors find 100 diamonds in the rough, Forbes used data from FactSet to compile its annual list of America’s Most Successful Small-Cap Companies. We screened nearly 1,000 companies with a market value between $300 million and $2 billion to find 389 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 top company on the list is glassmaker Tecnoglass, and other notables include coconut water retailer Vita Coco at No. 17 and Build-A-Bear Workshop at No. 74.

    The stocks were ranked 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 3, 2023.

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