ATRM is a semiconductor capital equipment company in the test, assembly and packaging (TAP) area. They have only a $25M market cap and $11M cash with no real debt. They had excellent expense control to help them get through the post-Lehman collapse in orders. While Q2 '09 was weak, the company noted "“We are witnessing increased activity in our customer base, and we have already booked as much in the third quarter of 2009 as we did in the first and second quarters combined, and shipped more in the third quarter than we did in the entire second quarter.". Since then I've been monitoring their known or likely analog chip customers and I believe ATRM will see a strong pick up in business. The stock is very illiquid and currently has no analyst coverage as they lost coverage from a regional broker when the analyst left the firm. The company should obviously do more to get noticed but they did tell me they were working on getting new coverage. If and when they get some decent analyst coverage back I suspect the stock will spike strongly if not before. I've also discussed this stock at marcpw.blogspot.com

Memsic (MEMS) is a chip company that makes MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems)which are semiconductors that include a sensor as part of the package. The sensor can sense pressure, heat, movement etc. They are used in autos for air bags and stability control, in mobile handsets, game consoles and many other application. The company gets a lot of its business from the China handset market. Do to the great variability in that market MEMSis looking to expand their business into more stable high margin areas like industrial. The company has a market cap of just $91M and has $67M in cash and no debt. They have a bunch of new products expected to hit or gain steam in 2010 including a gas flow meter which sounds like it is tremendously more sensitive than current technology. MEMS chips in general are in a big secular growth phase including benefiting from the move to smart phones as e.g. MEMS the company supplies accelerometers and more recently magnetic compasses for use in smart phone handets and makes the phones particularly good for location based services. The company did a presentation at a Jeffries conference on 9/15/09 that I believe is available on the Memsic website. I strongly advise that anyone interested listen to the webcast and look at the pdf slides to get a good feel for how exciting this company is.

Web.com Group is a web designer and hoster for small and medium size business. They make much of their money by selling valued added services from themselves and their partners. This company was actually named Website Pros. They acquired the fairly similar sized Web.com a couple of years age and decided to use the name Web.com and the symbol WWWW going forward for the combined company. The integration of the acquisition has been pretty much completed and it looks like they are successfully selling high value services to the old Web.com customers. The company got hit hard during the post-Lehman recession but conserved cash and has had an active buy back in place. The company currently has a market cap of $155M and $35M in cash. While this is not really a super grower I think it's very cheap.

Isis Pharmaceuticals isn't a microcap like the others but is my largest single holding. They have a tremendous platform with their antisense technology and their lead drug Mipomersen for which they partnered with GENZ looks like it could be a blockbuster