The TSX Venture released its Top 50 Performers over the past year, with a number of tech and life sciences stocks flexing their muscles.
The Venture’s overall top stock last year was clean tech company dynaCERT (dynaCERT Stock Quote, Chart, News TSXV:DYA), which excelled in all three categories — share price appreciation, market cap growth and trading volume — for the year ended December 31, 2019.
DynaCERT, a carbon emission reduction tech company, powered ahead with a 284 per cent increase in its share price, taking the stock from $0.185 to $0.75 per share by the year’s end. And DYA wasn’t done there, as the stock rode the tsunami wave in clean tech and renewable energy stocks over the past two months to 68 per cent gains so far in 2020.
Xebec Adsorption (Xebec Adsorption Stock Quote, Chart, News TSXV:XBC), Bee Vectoring Technologies (Bee Vectoring Technologies Stock Quote, Chart, News TSXV:BEE) and Acasti Pharma (Acasti Pharma Stock Quote, Chart, News TSXV:ACST) rounded out the top group in the Venture’s Clean Tech & Life Sciences category, while clinic and health tech company Well Health Technologies (Well Health Technologies Stock Quote, Chart, News TSX:WELL), which graduated to the senior board this past year, came out on top in the Diversified Industries category.
Score Media and Gaming (Score Media and Gaming Stock Quote, Chart, News TSXV:SCR), MediaValet (MediaValet Stock Quote, Chart, News TSXV:MVP), mCloud Technologies (mCloud Technologies Stock Quote, Chart, News TSXV:MCLD) and Sangoma Technologies (Sangoma Technologies Stock Quote, Chart, News TSXV:STC) topped the Technology category, where Score Media’s share price ballooned 140 per cent and its market cap grew by 156 per cent for the year.
In the Technology category, of the ten stocks that made the list the average share price gains were 113 per cent, with an average gain in market cap of 163 per cent. On average, the top ten tech stocks had two analysts covering them.
Altogether, stocks on the Venture 50 had an average share price appreciation of 123 per cent, up from 94 per cent the year before, with market capitalization gains of 226 per cent compared to 212 per cent gains over 2018.
Brady Fletcher, Managing Director and Head of TSX Venture Exchange for the TMX Group, spoke to Cantech Letter on Friday and said growing companies in the clean tech and life sciences spaces clearly benefit from their inclusion on the Venture.
“It’s an interesting story about the TSXV about how these tools, structures and platforms that we have like our Capital Pool Company (CPC) Program and broadly more access to public venture capital have really started to foster the growth of these clean tech and technology leaders. These tools were originally developed to foster the growth of the Canadian resource industry but they’re now really being leveraged by technology issuers,” Fletcher said.
Fletcher said currently the TSXV has a unique cohort of companies in tech and life sciences that go beyond your cannabis names of the past few years, with companies whose growth in market capitalization has helped them access follow-up capital, attention from the bigger investment banks and bank-owned dealers and ultimately to help grow their businesses.
“Technology entrepreneurs are saying, ‘We’d rather build a business for the long term. We don’t want to be handcuffed to just one venture funding partner,’ and so they look to TSX Venture as a way to access public venture capital and those follow-on rounds of capital,” Fletcher said.
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