Funds target 'unknown' stocks as Wall St cuts analyst jobs

New York

WITH a nearly 30 per cent gain in 2017, shares of industrial products maker Handy & Harman Ltd are outpacing hot stocks like Google's parent Alphabet Inc and Visa Inc. Yet few on Wall Street have ever heard of the US$412 million market-cap company, in large part because no sell-side research analysts publish any estimates of its earnings.

That lack of information is a boon to Paul Sonkin, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, whose firm owns shares of Handy & Harman. Mr Sonkin estimates that approximately 15 per cent of the companies in his portfolio have no sell-side analyst coverage, leaving them more likely to be overlooked.