Joseph Allen

investor relations firms with a truly international reach. Most of our clients are US corporations headquartered in the US and trading on US exchanges, but we have developed a wide-ranging expertise as well in dealing with cross-border corporations whose shares trade in the US. Many clients are headquartered in Europe, Australia, Africa or Asia, but are trading on US exchanges, some with ADRs and others with “native” US shares. Some clients trade on multiple exchanges, and we are adept at understanding and applying the rules and customs of different exchanges. Our proprietary databases, are national and international in scope, with more than 24,000 fund managers and buyside analysts and 4,500 sellside analysts. Our professional staff has a broad range of backgrounds, formal education and streetwise experience that helps us bring a distinctive approach to the tasks of establishing an appropriate positioning strategy, then creating and forwarding continuous, seamless communications strategies and pro-active awareness campaigns for our clients. We are experienced in organizing financial conferences; conducting opinion surveys of fund managers and analysts; preparing private companies for an Initial Public Offering; and setting up and conducting non-deal road trips all over North America, the UK, and Europe. We have also worked with investment banks in developing target lists for public and private offerings, and have set up nondeal and deal road trips for investment banks, PAL banks for ADR clients and depositary banks on a private-label basis. The most common goals of our investor relations programs are to improve awareness among target audiences – primarily institutional investors – and to improve liquidity in the trading of our clients’ securities. Long-term account retention has been a hallmark of Allen & Caron, and client additions have been primarily secured as a result of client referrals or recommendations from investment banks, institutional portfolio managers, sellside analysts and other professional associates. We believe that the quality, scope and value of the services we provide our clients is reflected by the fact that our primary sources of new business opportunities are our clients and industry associates.

bit like Johnny Appleseed, in that we plant those seeds, but we do not wait for the apples to grow. In other words, we are not stock-pickers nor market analysts. Over the course of a year we probably write about 300 or 400 small cap companies, and our research is usually done primarily with publicly available information. We don't make investment recommendations -- we just look for interesting companies, intriguing situations, and new names (or sometimes old names with some hair on them). We've been told that the name of the blog sounds promotional to some people. Actually it's anything but promotional -- it's more like a look-what-I-found opportunity. One of these days we will probably try to make up an index of the companies we write about.