One Guy's Investments: Annual Checkup -- CKCM

Click Commerce (CKCM -- free RT quote) is one of the smaller companies in my portfolio at $230 million (even after acquiring dozens of small software companies), and is certainly one of the more volatile. I made my most recent purchase back in October around $13, and my previous one around $25 in the Spring, and my average cost is just over $16 a share. Click works in several areas that are growing rapidly, and even though they have lots of competition I very much like their diversified product offerings, their growth potential, their reasonable valuation, and their charismatic CEO, Michael Ferro, who owns about 25-30% of the company. RFID data management certainly appears to be their major growth engine for the near future, and they are doing a good job signing up Wal Mart suppliers and getting other major retailers like Home Depot to use their integration software. I'm convinced that RFID will be a significant area of investment for all companies in the supply chain, but even if it isn't CKCM has lots of other business software solutions on offer and hundreds of other quality clients -- they're surprisingly diverse in their targeted product offerings for such a small company, and I like that. Because I can't really be an expert in the offerings of all the companies in this space, I just follow the cycle of investment in software services and the speed of RFID rollout as indicators for Click's potential growth, and as far as I can see things look very solid. CKCM has been extraordinarily volatile and is very underfollowed on the Street, but if we see prices drop under $20 again soon I'll be very tempted to add more -- this tiny company has a lot of room to grow, and heavy insider ownership means that the acquisitive CEO is on our side.

Labels: CKCM