Episode 11
The Registered Direct: The Overnight Deal That Resets Your Share Count
A company trades at four dollars all day. At five past four, after the bell, it agrees to sell twelve million dollars of stock at three dollars and twenty cents, with a warrant attached to every share. By morning the deal is done and the share count is permanently larger. That transaction is called a registered direct, and Atlas and Michael take it apart. What it is, why the discount and the warrant exist, who buys the paper, and how to read the filing before the open.
Episode 10
Introducing the Roundup: What to Watch and Why
The education series continues, and it gains a companion. A second weekly episode joins the feed: the Roundup. Each edition takes the week that just closed and turns it forward. The prints that landed, the moves that mattered, and what they set up for the week ahead: the calendar to watch, the names each event touches, and what would change the read. Education teaches the framework. The Roundup applies it in real time, every week. The first edition covers the week of July 27.
Episode 01
The Last Inefficient Market in America
Roughly four thousand U.S. public companies trade below $200M in market cap. Most professional money can’t buy them, most analysts won’t cover them, most retail investors have never heard of them. We unpack the four structural reasons Wall Street has abandoned this segment, and why that abandonment makes it the last truly inefficient market left in America.
Episode 02
How A Flat Stock Can Lose You Half Your Money
You bought a micro-cap at five dollars. A year later, it’s still trading at five dollars. Flat year, right? You actually lost about forty percent of your money. The chart doesn’t show it. The account doesn’t show it. But the math is undeniable. Host Atlas and co-host Michael walk through how dilution quietly destroys retail returns, the five SEC filings that reveal a company’s dilution profile in twenty minutes, and how to tell the difference between dilution that builds value and dilution that just buys survival.
Episode 03
The Toxic Convertible: How Falling Prices Trigger More Dilution
The specific instrument that creates death spirals in micro-caps. A convertible note priced at a discount to whatever the stock is trading at today. The stock drops, the conversion ratio expands, more shares hit the market, the stock drops again. We walk through what these structures actually look like in filings, why companies sign them anyway, and the warning signs that tell you a death spiral has already started.
Episode 04
Reverse Splits: The Failed Recovery Tool
A reverse split does not fix anything. It changes the share count and the price, not the business. Ten shares at one dollar become one share at ten dollars, and the market capitalization is identical the second before and the second after. We walk through why boards run reverse splits anyway, usually to hold an exchange listing, what the record shows about where these stocks tend to trade six and twelve months later, and the filings that tell you whether a split is a cleanup or a warning.
Episode 06
The Going Concern Warning: When the Auditor Stops Believing
Buried in the footnotes of some annual reports is a sentence that changes everything: substantial doubt about the ability to continue as a going concern. We cover what triggers the language, what auditors are actually required to test, why some companies carry the warning for years and survive, and the filing signals that separate a manageable cash crunch from a terminal one.
Episode 09
The Float and the Lockup: Who Can Actually Sell
Shares outstanding is one number. The float, the shares actually free to trade, is another, and in micro-caps the gap between them decides how a stock moves. We cover what the float really is, why restricted shares and insider blocks sit outside it, how lockup expirations put a date on the calendar when new supply gets set loose, and why a tiny float can make a stock violent in both directions. The last piece of the share count puzzle: not how many shares exist, but who is actually allowed to sell them, and when.
Episode 08
Warrants: The Dilution Hiding in the Fine Print
Shares are not the only thing a micro-cap hands out when it raises. Attached to many of those deals are warrants: the right to buy new stock later, at a fixed price. They sit quietly in the filings, invisible until the stock moves and they convert into a fresh wave of supply. We cover what a warrant actually is, how to find the strike price and the count, why a low strike is an overhang the share count does not yet show, and how to read a capitalization table so the dilution you can see and the dilution you cannot are finally on the same page.
Episode 07
The Shelf and the ATM: How Micro-Caps Print Shares
An S-3 shelf registration is a loaded weapon. An at-the-market facility is the trigger. Together they let a company sell new shares into the open market quietly, sometimes daily, and most holders never notice until the share count update lands. We explain how to find the shelf in the filings, size the remaining capacity, and read the quarterly share count like a scoreboard.
Episode 05
Insider Transactions: Reading What Management Actually Believes
Executives call the stock undervalued in every press release. The Form 4 filings show what they do with their own money. We break down how to read insider activity in micro-caps: why a scheduled 10b5-1 sale is not the same signal as an open-market purchase, the difference between insiders adding and insiders quietly exiting, and how to separate genuine conviction from routine compensation in what management files.
Episode 12
Use of Proceeds: Where the Raise Actually Goes
The company just raised twenty million dollars. The filing says working capital and general corporate purposes. Atlas and Michael read what that phrase permits, what it conceals, and how to track the money after it lands.
Episode 13
Related Party Transactions: The Deal Nobody Negotiated Against
A company leases its warehouse from a business the chief executive owns. Legal, disclosed, and sitting in a section most people scroll past. Atlas and Michael read that section: who counts as a related party, where the dollar amounts hide, and the four questions that separate a normal arrangement from a problem.
Episode 14
The Spike: What a Company Does the Morning After Good News
A drug company posted results on an experimental treatment and gained one hundred seventy seven percent in a single session, then gave back a quarter of it the next day. Atlas and Michael take apart the binary catalyst: why the repricing happens in seconds, where the supply comes from afterward, and why a spike is a financing window that closes fast.
Episode 15
The Auditor Walked: Reading a Change of Accountant
A company files a document on a Tuesday afternoon. It runs under a page, carries no press release, and says the company has a new accounting firm. Atlas and Michael read it properly: why resigned and dismissed mean opposite things, why the line about disagreements tells you almost nothing, and the one exhibit almost nobody opens.
Episode 16
The Delisting Clock: The One Deadline That Is Actually Dated
Almost nothing in a small company filing comes with a date attached. Going concern tells you a company may not survive, but not when. A shelf tells you shares may be sold, but not which day. There is one exception. Atlas and Michael cover the exchange listing clock: the thirty days below a dollar that start it, the letter the company has to disclose, the one hundred eighty days to cure, and why losing a listing can cost a company its fast route to raising money at exactly the wrong moment.
Episode 17
You Can Buy It. Can You Sell It?
Every micro-cap position has two prices: the one you paid and the one you can actually get out at. Atlas and Michael cover liquidity as a position-sizing problem, not a chart problem: average daily volume against the size you want, why the bid disappears on the day you need it, how a wide spread quietly taxes every round trip, and the arithmetic that tells you when your position is a larger share of a day's trading than the market will absorb.
Episode 18
The Back Door: How a Company Became Public Without an IPO
Almost nobody asks how a small company became public, and in this corner of the market the answer explains more than the business plan. Atlas and Michael cover the reverse merger: a private company buys a public shell and is listed the next morning, with no prospectus, no underwriter, and no roadshow. What the shell brings with it, the holders who paid a fraction of a cent, and why the exchanges now make these companies wait a year to uplist.
Roundup 01
Week of July 27-31, 2026
The first edition of the weekly watch format. What the coming week sets up, and why it matters down-cap.
Roundup 02
Week of August 3-7, 2026
The calendar, the prints on deck, and the threads carried forward from the prior tape.
Roundup 03
Week of August 10-14, 2026
Inflation landed in line and producer prices ran soft. Underneath it, the Russell two thousand hit record highs three times while retail sales posted their steepest drop in over a year.
Roundup 04
Week of August 17-21, 2026
Oil rose five percent after a diplomatic breakdown, the thirty year Treasury yield hit its highest level in nearly two decades, and the Fed minutes showed several officials wanting hikes. Then Walmart posted its weakest quarterly sales in over six years.
Roundup 05 and 06 Double edition
Weeks of August 24-28 and August 31 to September 4, 2026
Two weeks in one, because they turned out to be a single story. Nvidia guided far above what anyone modeled and the new chair used his first Jackson Hole keynote to say there is more work to do on inflation. Then August payrolls came in at three times expectations, and July was revised from a loss of twenty three thousand jobs to a gain of twenty one thousand. The negative print that anchored the whole August rally never actually happened.
Roundup 07
Week of September 7-11, 2026
Four sessions, four declines, then a Friday that took some of it back. Brent settled above $107 and finished the week up about nine percent, the ten-year touched 4.95% and the thirty-year a level last seen in 2007, and August inflation came in at 3.4% with core at its lowest since March 2021. Small caps lost three times what the S&P 500 lost. The rate decision lands Wednesday.
Roundup 08
Week of September 14-18, 2026
The Fed raised rates a quarter point to 3.75% to 4.00%, unanimously, and 16 of 18 officials now see at least one more hike this year. The bigger number was the ten-year Treasury, which cleared 5% for the first time since 2007. Why a 5% risk-free rate resets the math on every company that needs capital, and why the Dow had its worst week since March while technology rose.
Roundup 09, coming soon
Week of September 21-25, 2026
The week after the hike: whether the ten-year holds above 5%, what officials say about October, and what a higher floor under rates means for companies that raise capital next.
