We didn’t sell a single share

Next Investors response to last week:

Kuniko Ltd (ASX: KNI) is clearly the biggest story of the week after its 20c IPO traded between 80c to $1.05 during its opening day on Tuesday. Congratulations to the lucky ones who got a rare allocation in the IPO. We added KNI to our portfolio on Tuesday, the day it was listed.Two days later, the KNI share price went nuts after it released what we thought was a pretty vanilla exploration update. It soared to as high as $3.60 on massive volume, going into a price query trading halt before re-opening on Friday, where it spent the day pretty comfortably bouncing around the $2 mark on an outrageous ~$64M shares traded.We’ve been investing for a long time but haven’t seen anything like that in years. We think the KNI share price action during the last two days is a combination of a few things:Tiny amount of KNI shares on issue: There are only ~53M KNI shares on issue, and VUL holds over a quarter of them. This, combined with other sticky holders, means there aren't as many shares to go around to anyone who wants to build a long term position. Long term investors and VUL holders/followers who missed out on the IPO or didn't get a big enough IPO allocation trying to build a long term position in KNI were buying up shares on market and holding on to them, further reducing the KNI free float every hour.Day traders rapidly buying and selling caught hold of KNI on Thursday, and probably amplified the share price swings when combined with long term investors buying and holding their positions.KNI’s direct association to VUL’s rise: There is little doubt that VUL is the market darling of the last 2 years, so there was already going to be a huge amount of positive attention on KNI and its tiny 53M shares on issue.We can’t predict what will happen over the next few weeks, but we think KNI will continue to hold on to a relatively high valuation given the amount of attention on it and low number of shares on issue. Despite KNIs early stage, It looks like many investors are happy to pay a premium price for what they believe could be another successful European Zero Carbon battery metals story, like VUL.Last week’s KNI share price activity was extreme and we hope that any KNI investors out there have created their own investment plan that works for them and are sticking to it.We didn’t sell a single KNI share last week. We are long term holders in KNI, so are happy to have the majority of our KNI stock escrowed for 2 years — meaning we can’t sell it until then. For the KNI stock we hold that is NOT escrowed, even if we wanted to sell last week when the price spiked (to free carry as part of our long term investment strategy), we can’t. That’s because we must ALWAYS adhere to our strict trading blackouts that are in place for 3 days after we send an email about a company. Time to address comments about us in news and social media.The more we have been succeeding with our long term stock selections, the more new subscribers we are getting, and many are providing us positive feedback.But in recent months, we also seem to be attracting some negative attention and comments across media, social media, reddit, stock chat rooms etc from people who don’t understand our service. While some of it has been constructive and we have used it to improve our service - our policy has been to NOT publically respond to any of the uninformed, unconstructive comments in order to “not give them any more oxygen”.But when our subscribers start emailing us about it, we felt it was time to address the negative commentary around our company to our subscribers:Our mission is to use our experience in the markets to build a high performing ASX micro cap stock portfolio and share our long term investment journey with our readers over time.We are a small team of six and we spend a long time researching the stocks we pick. We invest in them ourselves. We say NO to hundreds of investment opportunities each year that we WOULDN’T personally invest in and hence wouldn't share with our readers.Once we decide to invest, we ALSO request that the company pay us a fee in return for a service of researching, writing and sharing our opinions about our investment in the company over a couple of years. This fee is how our email list stays free to subscribers who receive our regular update emails containing our commentary on the progress of our carefully selected long term investments. This fee is why you see the Conflict of Interest Notice at the bottom of every email. It is also in our Disclosure Policy and Customer Notice on every page of our website.We ask for this fee for our service to be settled in shares in that company instead of in cash. In our view, taking shares as payment instead of cash is a vote of confidence in the long term prospects of the companies we write about, especially if the shares are escrowed.We operate under an Australian Financial Services License as a Corporate Authorised Representative.We have built a large subscriber following with our track record of selecting stocks that have delivered over time, so naturally there is growing interest in whichever stock that we pick next AND in the update emails we send about our existing investments.We can’t control if day traders decide to trade when we send an email update on one of our investments. In addition to being long term holders, we have always had in place trading blackouts for 3 trading days after we send an email about a company.Our model doesn’t work unless our commentary on our investments and the investment strategies we share are successful at least SOME of the time, which is why carefully selecting the stocks we invest in is critical. The small cap market is risky and we certainly don’t always get it right, but we have been on a pretty good run lately.