It's not so much they all tank at once as it's hard to figure out what SFE owns. They may own 40% or a company, but TL I ventures owns 20% and SFE owns 10% of TL ventures, but TLI doesn't publish its ownership share the way SFE does, so you have to guess.
They focus on IT (especially services with some verticals like banking, healthcare and some generalists like CATP), Internet companies, energy, and international (kind of a catch all)
Most of their investments are in Penn. area and east coast (home turf) though they have a substantial # of holdings in CA as well.
I've held SFE since they started NOVL (they were the orig. VCs there) and it goes in fits and starts. It was stuck at $17 for 3 years and then split twice (total of 6:1) and went on a 3 year rampage. It has plateaued lately, but seems to be breaking out for a long run.
As John Arnopp, Michael and others have chronicled. SFE usually trades on the basis of its "NAV" like a mutual fund, with no value assigned to pre-public companies. That seems to have changed now, and the "great debate" is whether (largely due to the internet holdings) the market will now recognize its non-public portfolio.
SFE has about 30 companies, only half of which are public (roughly). If you count their stake in TL1, TL2, Radnor Venture Partners, Entertech (another VC firm), PERS (another VC partnership) ICG, etc, they probably have closer to 45 companies. Some will be home runs. Others will not.
Best recent performance was CCSC (bought by TLAB) SCAI (slowed down lately) CATP (a home run, but nothing but bad news for the past 12 months). If you buy and hold the IPO rights, you usually do quite well over the long term, however, because SFE serves as its own market maker and buys shares to prop up the price of its companies when needed./appropriate based on value.
Hope this helps. |
