The One Dollar Stock Share Challenge

Today we’re going to discuss Robinhood. It’s been all over Facebook feeds, and some people have claimed to have made tremendous amounts of money, but pending another bubble – the question is how can you position the money you NOW have to bring you sustainable and honest returns?

As a technologist, my interest begins and ends – almost exclusively in that domain, and as you are exploring what’s being sold through Robinhood, the list feature will be a great way to outline any potential purchases.  Depending on your workforce – it’s going to take some discipline to avoid adding an unmanageable number of potential investments to your listing.  Because of that tendency, I am going to limit myself to 3 one-dollar shares, in a large, medium, and small sized company.  

As you begin to think these things through however, you quickly realize that difficulty in measuring this. What is to be considered a “large amount” of employees, or “medium”, or “small”?  Working from my base with Charter-Spectrum, the cut-off for a large company is going to be 95,000 employees. We will half split that and define medium to be 47,500 – and finally a small company to be 23,750.

Now, one problem I am facing is that there doesn’t seem to be a built-in feature on Robinhood to facilitate this type of research. Perhaps that will be coming? Though, continuing with this metric, is quite difficult Robinhood has curated a Technology-based Trending List – which can be filter based on market caps instead.  

It seems to stand to reason that a company with a smaller market cap would have fewer employees, so we will now add this variable to our search.  Its worth noting that the trending technology page has filters beyond the Market Cap that would prove useful, but that will not be covered today.

As I am indexing this trending list, it’s worth mentioning that my eye is drawn to companies I seen market often, and it is for this reason that in spot number 3, I’ve chosen Vizio – and after researching the company, see that it only has registered 500 employees! This company must be very I.P. focused!

Now, in this middle range – there are some creative sparks flying! I have sort of max out a min-max, but the middle range, much like a Venn Diagram, may be best understood as a “connective zone”. Where I ask the question, how are or how can these two entities be connected? Ideally, that’s where K.T.S. will come into play in coming years, but for now only public entities are even tradeable!

So then, we look at what each company offers. 1. Charter Spectrum is a national ISP delivering Television, Internet, and Voice services to it customers. 3. Vizio, specializes in “It engages in deriving the future of televisions through its integrated platform of cutting-edge Smart TVs and powerful SmartCast operating system.” What links these two domains? That is where Southern Copper comes it! While there may be many, many potential links – perhaps the most ubiquitous answer is material, and that material is copper. It’s use in every inch of cable networks, and is a fundamental component of all electronic systems.

After some reflection, it did seem that with Charter Spectrums’ wireless streaming services being limited to specific television brands, primarily and to the best of my knowledge, allowing their users to operate the Spectrum Television App exclusively on Samsung Smart TVs. The unfortunate part about this was that Robinhood does not have any listing for this company – alas, by the time these sorts of things align their policy may have already changed, and who knows when that information will be widely known! 

In summary, we didn’t meet our goal of purchasing a whole value share for $1.00 but, we ended up with 3 strategically aligned partial shares – the next question is how can we impact them with such a small portion in each company? I’m having thoughts on automation…