Why we exist
We help small & mid-cap Canadian issuers attract high quality shareholders.
Since 2019, I’ve been obsessed with the business of research. I’ve spent the better part of a decade exploring the industry from both the institutional side and the internet side - both come with positives and negatives.
During that time, we’ve watched some incredible Canadian companies struggle to get the investor attention they deserve. The reasons behind this problem are structural and getting worse, as the institutional landscape evolves and no credible options exist outside of it - resulting in discounted valuations and a wave of take-privates.
Fortunately, the internet gives you all the tools you need to take ownership of the problem - we’re built to help you do that.
What’s happening to the sell-side?
Research is a cost center. Its incentives are steered by sales & trading and investment banking.
It’s no secret that broker equity research is a money losing business, designed to support the commercial efforts of the sales & trading desk or deal teams (equity capital markets, investment banking, corporate banking, etc.). As a result, the financial incentives in these divisions influence the way research operates.
Sales & trading is a flow business. It makes money on the steady stream of order execution, position financing, and hedging among other activities - so its main client is the buy-side. This influences the marketing impact of research in two ways:
Short-term bias: The desk isn’t making money on a buy & hold investor, it’s making money on volume. If you want to attract long-term investors, this financial incentive is misaligned.
Buy-side distribution: Research relies on sales to distribute their message. If your stock isn’t liquid and there’s no inbound buy-side demand, the desk can’t make money on you - so there’s no financial incentive to share your story.
Investment & corporate banking is a size business. It makes money on the fees attached to advisory mandates, capital raises, and credit facilities - so its main client is the corporate issuer. Large companies who grow through M&A financed by debt and equity are the highest fee payers, creating a financial incentive for research to work harder for them than a small or mid-cap company prioritizing organic growth.
The result? A research product that supports the broker, not the issuer. Ask any buy-side investor what they think of broker equity research. It reads like a textbook, is laced with jargon, and is centered around short-term price targets & ratings instead of what matters most: your company. It’s low readership, low engagement, and low impact - optimizing for the speed of production instead of investor understanding.
What’s happening to the buy-side?
A shrinking number of small & mid-cap mandates limits the pool of available capital.
At the same time, the number of small & mid-cap institutional funds is shrinking - driven by the gradual sell-side drift upmarket and liquidity constraints for larger funds.
The result? An increasingly ineffective traditional investor marketing playbook. Conferences, roadshows, and 1-on-1s are far less impactful than they used to be. They’re costly, time consuming, and a large portion of brokered meetings are based on favours - as the industry optimizes for facetime over genuine interest.
What’s happening on the internet?
The perfect solution, polluted by a riskier part of the industry.
The internet has given us all the tools necessary to address these challenges, which most other industries have adopted aggressively - with US digital marketing spend alone doubling to nearly $300B since 2020.
Your equity is a product and investors are consumers, making the reasons behind the adoption of digital marketing directly applicable:
Measurable: Digital gives you a granular understanding of the impact of a dollar invested, turning investor marketing into a repeatable capital allocation exercise.
Scalable: Digital gives you the ability to adjust the scale of your investor marketing program in real time and direct your efforts towards specific investor demographics and geographies.
Cost effective: Relative to traditional forms of investor marketing (conferences, road shows, etc.), digital marketing is inexpensive in terms of capital and time invested.
So why hasn’t the industry moved towards digital? The answer ties back to how this industry got its start. Small issuers with no broker coverage had no way to reach investors, so an ecosystem was built to facilitate this activity. While useful for micro and nano-cap companies, the industry isn’t suited for small and mid-cap companies for a number of reasons:
Limited distribution: What can move the needle for thinly traded micro-caps isn’t enough for larger companies. On top of the absolute level of distribution not cutting it, the investor risk-profile is misaligned. You want quality long-term shareholders, not short-term traders.
Reputational risk: Because the industry was built around speculative issuers it’s riddled with promotional material, company blow-ups, and fraudulent activity. There is real reputational risk in being associated with most existing options.
Lack of transparency: There’s limited information available to help you think about pricing and performance correctly, making it difficult to move forward with an investment in digital.
Let’s work together
We’ve handled the hard parts for you and built the best of both worlds.
To be clear, what we do isn’t rocket science - but it’s very hard to replicate. We invest capital to grow distribution in a given channel and an equity research professional keeps that channel extremely engaged with high quality information. The result? Trustworthy, fact-based marketing that helps Canadian companies reach thousands of new investors.
Our distribution generates hundreds of thousands of investor impressions and our coverage ensures those impressions are educational, not promotional. We help you get discovered, understood, and popular - in that order.
We look forward to working for you,
Eli Rodney
Founding Partner
Trusted by high quality Canadian companies:
