These stocks you walk past every single day

2026-09-11 · By Lubin Danilo, founder of Lubin Investment

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My quality screener surfaces dozens of small caps, between 1 and 6 billion dollars in market value, scoring eight out of ten or better. Seven of them share one thing: you run into them in daily life (an airport, a gym, a used car search) without knowing they trade publicly. Here is their numbers, checked one by one.

Seven small caps, one thing in common

My quality screener judges every stock on ten financial criteria, from net margin to buybacks, and surfaces dozens of companies scoring eight out of ten or better every week in the 1 to 6 billion dollar market cap range. That is a peculiar size: too big to be a speculative bet, too small for a fund manager who has to deploy several billion dollars without moving the price. As a result, these companies show up in almost no mainstream financial ranking.

I filtered that list on one more criterion, a non-financial one: everyday recognition, not stock market fame. The seven names below, you have probably already run into this year without knowing they were publicly traded. Checked one by one through my analysis tool rather than pulled from a cached ranking, here is their numbers as of September 11, 2026.

Hamilton Lane: getting paid to manage other people's money

Hamilton Lane is not an investment fund the way you might picture one: it is an asset manager that invests other people's money (pension funds, family offices, insurers) into private equity, for a fee. The mechanic that makes this business interesting is called carried interest: beyond a minimum guaranteed return to the investor (the hurdle rate, often 8% a year), the manager keeps a share of the gains, traditionally 20%, on top of a 2% annual fee on assets managed, the well-known '2 and 20' formula. The more the managed funds grow and perform, the more that share grows with them, without the manager having to put up the invested capital itself.

Hamilton Lane managed or advised on 1 trillion dollars in assets by the end of its fiscal year 2026, of which 81.5 billion was fee-earning discretionary assets, up 13% year over year, with the rest being advisory and reporting work for clients who manage their own money. That distinction matters: the part that actually generates recurring fees is smaller than the headline number, but it is growing faster than the whole. On my criteria, the company passes nine out of ten, with a 30% return on invested capital and negative net debt, meaning it holds more cash than debt.

The one caveat: my model puts the current price almost exactly at my fair value estimate, within 2%. No obvious discount here, unlike Clear Secure below: this is a case of quality the market has already spotted and priced close to fairly, not a forgotten gem.

Clear Secure: the quiet monopoly on airport fast lanes

If you have ever seen those blue gates scanning an iris or a face at a US airport, you have run into Clear Secure without knowing it. Its moat rests on a reverse network effect: the more airports it signs, the more useful the membership becomes to a frequent traveler, the more new airports it attracts to capture those same travelers. Total CLEAR membership climbed 30% year over year to 43.5 million, with 62 airports equipped with biometric gates by the end of the second quarter of 2026.

On my criteria, Clear Secure passes nine out of ten, with a free cash flow margin of 46%, the cash that is actually left once every bill is paid, as a share of sales: one of the highest margins on my entire screener. The one criterion that fails is telling: share count grows 4.36% a year, dilution that most likely comes from stock-based compensation paid to employees. That is not a footnote, every new share slightly shrinks the existing shareholder's slice of the pie, even while the business itself is doing well. My model still points to a 59% discount versus my reasonable buy price, the most attractive valuation of the group among the ones I trust the number on.

The other five, in brief

Planet Fitness (eight out of ten, the 10-dollar-a-month gym franchisor) buys back its own shares aggressively but carries heavy debt relative to its cash generation, close to nine years of net debt over annual free cash flow: the franchise expansion model creates debt before it creates cash. CarGurus (eight out of ten, the site where you compare used car prices) shows the cheapest valuation of the group at 11.3 times free cash flow, but its sales have shrunk 5.7% a year over five years: cheap does not mean growing, a distinction that costs a lot if you miss it.

ACI Worldwide (eight out of ten, the software quietly running a good chunk of the world's bank transfers) carries the most expensive valuation of the group after Symbotic, at 23.9 times free cash flow, for sales growth capped around 7% a year. Bright Horizons (eight out of ten, the daycare your US employer might fund) shares the same weak spot as Planet Fitness: debt above five years of free cash flow, the real risk to watch in labor-intensive service businesses.

Symbotic (nine out of ten, the robots that assemble orders inside automated warehouses) deserves its own paragraph, because two facts pull in opposite directions here. On one hand, the company just turned profitable, with 55 million dollars in net income in the third quarter of its fiscal 2026, versus a 21 million dollar loss a year earlier, on revenue up 22%, with a 22.5 billion dollar backlog giving visibility on contracts running up to fifteen years. On the other hand, this story rests almost entirely on a single customer: Walmart accounted for 85% of its fiscal 2025 revenue, a concentration that rightly worries investors. Its net margin, still close to zero at 0.5%, also makes my discount estimate statistically fragile, one of the classic limits of any discounted cash flow model built on a tiny starting base, documented among others by Aswath Damodaran: I would rather tell you that than display a three-digit number that gives a false sense of precision. What stands out most to me is the dilution, 27.6% more shares every year, the highest of the group, largely tied to stock-based compensation at a still-young company.

Why these names never make it into a ranking

Stock market rankings are almost always built by sector or by index, which mechanically pushes toward the most-followed large caps: the bigger a stock, the more likely it belongs to an index, gets covered by analysts, and ends up in an automated ranking. A pure size filter, between 1 and 6 billion dollars, surfaces a completely different set of companies, too big to be speculative bets, too small to interest a manager who has to deploy several billion dollars without moving the price.

That is exactly the filter I apply in my analysis tool, which judges every stock on the same ten financial criteria regardless of size or fame: profitability, sales and cash growth, buybacks rather than dilution, controlled debt, return on invested capital. Every criterion is detailed in my full methodology. I am not recommending any of these seven names blindly, the score tells you the quality of the business, not the right price or the right timing, as I flagged above for both Hamilton Lane and Symbotic.

FAQ

What is carried interest in private equity?

It is the share of gains a fund manager keeps beyond a minimum guaranteed return to investors (the hurdle rate, often 8% a year), traditionally 20% of profits on top of a 2% annual fee on assets managed. It is meant to align the manager's interest with the fund's actual performance, not just its size.

Why does a quality small cap stay so unknown?

Because stock indices and financial rankings mechanically favor large caps: they get more analyst coverage, sit in more index funds, and stay more visible as a result. A company between 1 and 6 billion dollars can have comparable financial quality and still never show up in a mainstream ranking.

What does a discount above 100% in your model actually mean?

My model projects free cash flow per share five years out, then discounts it back to estimate a reasonable buy price. For a fast-growing company starting from a small cash base, that projection can dwarf the current price on paper. The more extreme the number, the more it depends on flawless execution: I flag it explicitly when the starting base is too thin for the figure to be trustworthy, as with Symbotic in this piece.

Should you invest in any of these seven stocks?

That depends on your conviction in each story and your price discipline, not on a score alone. The financial quality I measure says nothing about the right timing or the right price, two things I always judge separately. This is not investment advice, do your own research.

Related reading

• Unexpected sectors: HST, CWCO, OMAB, IMAX in the screener
• Almost perfect stocks: what the missing criterion changes
• ETF or stock-picking? The honest answer for the DIY investor

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About the author

Written by Lubin Danilo, founder of Lubin Investment. A self-taught individual investor, I find fundamental analysis fascinating, and it has delivered excellent results. For three years now, my performance has beaten the S&P 500. But analyzing every stock took too much time: sites with incomplete data, calculation methods and criteria never aligned with mine. And spotting the best stocks was just as time-consuming, even with my own well-defined checklist. So I put my software development background to work to build this software, base my investment strategy on its results, and share it with people who share the same passion as me. It judges a company's quality and its price separately, using criteria drawn from the financial literature (Warren Buffett, Michael Mauboussin, Aswath Damodaran).