Most investors only know the big names.
The smaller ones are harder to find.
But they have something the giants don’t: room to run.
In the latest episode of Ticker Take on YouTube, I spoke with Jordan Zinberg, President and CEO of Bedford Park Capital, who has built his career hunting for these names. He started out in large caps like most investors, but quickly realized smaller companies were more interesting, faster growing, and often traded at lower multiples with less competition from other investors. As he puts it, nobody is going to hire him to buy shares of Royal Bank of Canada.
Zinberg sorts his picks into three buckets. Established compounders are companies with a long track record of high growth. Emerging compounders have the same growth profile but a shorter history, so he starts smaller and builds his positions over time. The third bucket is everything else: spin-offs, clean-up trades, high yield bonds, anything unique.
Inside those buckets, he wants sustainable growth, a reasonable multiple given that growth, aligned management teams, and strong share price momentum.
With that framework in mind, here are the 6 stocks he highlighted. As always, this is not financial advice.
Propel Holdings (PRL)
A Canadian fintech that uses AI-driven underwriting to make small unsecured loans in the U.S. and U.K. non-prime markets. Zinberg calls it the perfect pitch: top and bottom line growth of 20 to 30 per cent a year, significant insider ownership, a dividend, and a stock trading at roughly six times next year’s earnings.
Bird Construction (BDT)
One of Canada’s biggest contractors, building highways, hospitals and now data centres. Zinberg points to the company’s discipline around margins and its recent partnership with Bell to support a multi-year, Canada-wide AI data centre buildout, with the stock still trading at about two-thirds the multiple of larger peers like Aecon. Note Bell is the parent company of BNN Bloomberg.
TerraVest Industries (TVK)
A diversified industrial business that makes home heating products and storage tanks, including some now used in data centres. Zinberg calls it a true compounder, with a management team in their 40s holding a large stake and a simple playbook of acquiring companies at around six times EBITDA. The stock has compounded at 20 to 30 per cent a year for several years and has been a core holding in his fund for four.
Zedcor (ZDC)
Zedcor builds mobile security towers that replace overnight guards at construction sites and big-box retailers, leasing them out for around $2,500 a month versus roughly $30 an hour for human security. The real growth is in the U.S., which last quarter overtook Canada in revenue for the first time, and the market is watching for a potential enterprise deal that could deliver close to 500 new towers in a single order.
Source Energy Services (SHLE)
A frack sand supplier and one of the largest in the western Canadian market, running more like a logistics business that moves sand by rail from Wisconsin to Alberta and B.C. The stock has roughly ten-bagged since Zinberg first bought it, still trades at a low multiple, and he sees it as a possible takeout candidate after a comparable deal in the space last year.
Atlas Salt (SALT)
Zinberg said he’s sharing this pick publicly for the first time on Ticker Take. The company is developing a major rock salt mine in Newfoundland near power and a port, aiming to sell road salt into eastern Canada and the eastern U.S. He notes that no new salt mine has been built in North America in decades, and sees the stock potentially moving to between $5 and $10 over the next few years.
The Ticker Take
What ties Zinberg’s picks together is the work it takes to find them. Most don’t show up on screens built around size or analyst coverage, and a few would never make an institutional buy list at all.
That’s the point. The lower multiples, the absence of coverage, the unglamorous business descriptions are the source of the opportunity, not a warning to stay away. For investors willing to do the homework, Zinberg’s framework offers a useful starting point: growth that holds up over years, a multiple that fits, and management that owns the stock.
Jon Erlichman is a BNN Bloomberg contributor and the host of Ticker Take on YouTube.
