Fortune Small Business is out with its annual FSB 100 list, which measures the fastest growing (by revenues) publicly-traded small business listed on U.S. exchanges. As always, it is both fascinating and frustrating.

Though the FSB 100 has many intriguing prospects, it is horribly laid out and almost impossible to assess in the format provided. For example, there’s no way on the FSB site to get a handle on the market cap of the list except one company at a time. It's another instance of a layout designed to generate unnecessary page views (and advertisement cpm’s) at the cost of reader convenience.

MiddleBrook Biopharmaceuticals (MBRK), headquartered in Germantown, MD, has been the best performing US stock this year, up 255%. Keryx Pharmaceuticals (KERX), headquartered in New York, NYm has been the worst performing US stock, down 94.5% year to date.

What a month it was - for the stocks I cover/own and even more so for Mr. Market. Due in large part to the difficulties with the mortgage industry, markets remain in a quandary, trying to assess the fallout. The uncertainty of confusing news is such that recently it has seemed to take Mr. Market a day or more to fully digest the latest developments. At the end of last week, he was trying to understand the resilience of a troubled bond insurer when surprise employment and consumer confidence data, both negative, were reported. Mr. Market was in a good mood at the end of the day, having brushed aside these key indicators.

The following articles discuss stocks mentioned in this post:

Early on, Warren Buffett took control of a small New England textile mill that became the namesake for his new company. Since then the company bearing the mill’s name, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) (BRK.B), has witnessed incredible growth because of its ability to invest effectively. With a market capitalization in excess of $220 billion, Berkshire Hathaway no longer buys small companies. What if they did? Perhaps they would invest in microcaps, but which ones?

Tough Hurdle

I'm not aware of any resource that focuses on dividend-paying microcaps (or even smallcaps). But with just a little work, we can track them down. I use these two tools:

1. MSN Money Deluxe Stock Screener: screening for stocks with a market capitalization of less than $250,000,000 and current dividend yield of >= 2 will bring a good list to start with. I usually set the screener to return the top 100 matches, and sift through those.

2. Yahoo! News Search: searching for "dividends & .ob" will bring up recent dividend announcements for otc bb stocks that might not show up in the screen (for example, if they have just recently announced a dividend). Here's the same thing for the pinkies. (I don't have a good search to capture dividend news for the microcaps trading on the Nasdaq, AMEX or NYSE. Do you?)