Research Notes: The Story of SPOK and MASS
Catching up on MASS and SPOK after nearly pulling the trigger
⚡ Highlights:
We look at a pair of stocks — SPOK and MASS — that didn’t quite make the cut for Sunday deep dives, then promptly rallied.
Pager company Spok seems like the most blatant value trap imaginable. But management is focused on shareholder value and the business is much better than an investor would think.
908 Devices is a busted IPO, but one with reasonable long-term potential and a potentially attractive valuation.
Publishing a 3,000-word article every Sunday morning in some ways is the easy part. Selecting the stock to recommend can be the greater challenge, particularly in a market in which fundamental analysis is so difficult.
We’ve admittedly made a couple of recommendations we wish we hadn’t. We’ve also dug into, yet failed to recommend, a few ideas that have worked out well. Eyeglass retailer National Vision EYE 0.00%↑, which we highlighted on Twitter last week, was a fundamental short that seemed so obvious we figured we must have been missing something. A similar sense held for overleveraged retailer JOANN JOAN 0.00%↑, which is now below $2.
We’ve even alluded (at least once) to a short of Home Depot HD 0.00%↑, a trade which seemed potentially foolish given the long-term quality of that business, but one which would have worked (shares are down 16% since early February)1.
In this week’s Research Notes, we’ll take a look at a couple of long ideas that we couldn’t quite get over the hump yet have done well since. Both remain intriguing stories. But to be compelling they probably need another pullback. In this market, such a pullback might not be that far away.
Why Does SPOK Even Exist?
Were I to recommend that you buy a publicly-traded pager company, you might have some questions in response:
“Do you mean pagers pagers? The things people used like 20 years ago?
“You know that PagerDuty PD 0.00%↑ doesn’t actually make pagers, right?”
“Why the [expletive] would I buy a publicly-traded pager company?”
To be fair, they would all be somewhat valid questions. But Spok Holdings SPOK 0.00%↑ is in fact a publicly-traded pager company — and it's actually a decent business.
