This post leads directly on from my last one , and the premise is the same; it's a new year and I've been out of the loop for a little while, so I'll do a quick catch up by rattling off some shares that are potentially interesting. Some of them have come up on screeners, some were interesting a while ago and have had price movements and a great number were suggested to me by followers on Twitter or through email. For that I am grateful!

As with the last few years in the blog, there are a few shares I definitely won't be looking at - oil/energy and mining stocks specifically. I realise many of these are pet favourites for small cap investors, but they hold no allure for me; they are particularly volatile, require a specific skill-set to analyse, often have complex geopolitical connotations and - more than anything - are just extremely unlikely to tick the boxes that I want ticking. There's such a strong macroeconomic component in commodity industries; while that is a pet hobby of mine, I don't like to conflate it with my stock picking too much.

I read a lot of persuasive pieces on small cap oil/gas/mining stocks; counter-intuitively, this rather puts me off. Reading every piece and thinking they sound like great investments is an excellent sign that I just don't have the skills to properly appraise them, know the right questions to ask, or am properly understanding the issues.

Rambling aside, here are my 'teaser' descriptions of the other stocks I've found interesting.

The list

Universe (LON:UNG) - Universe is a provider of payment systems and loyalty schemes, predominantly for use on petrol forecourts. Check out their website to see what this means; as ever when investigating companies, I find myself constantly amazed by the level of detail and work that goes into something so superficially simple. There's no time for getting misty-eyed, though; Universe is already something of a success story for Wexboy, a fellow blogger (follow link for his typically entertaining and uncannily prescient analysis) and, later, red. As ever, it seems, I'm a little late to the party; but the past is the past, and it's the future that I really care about. On first glance, it looks like a highly niche company with…

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