Gun Detection System Provider is Top Portfolio Pick from this Calamos Investments Superstar Investor

July 27, 2019

Brandon M. Nelson, Senior Portfolio Manager, is responsible for the portfolio management of Calamos Investments LLC’s small- and smid-cap growth strategies. He draws upon more than 22 years of experience in small- and smid-cap growth equity investing, utilizing the same philosophy and process employed by Calamos Timpani Small Cap Growth Fund (MUTF:CTSIX) today.

He is also a member of the Calamos investment committee, which is charged with providing a top-down framework, maintaining oversight of risk and performance metrics, and evaluating investment process.

Mr. Nelson joined Calamos Investments following its 2019 acquisition of Timpani Capital Management, the company he co-founded in 2008, where he served as Chief Investment Officer and Portfolio Manager of the Timpani strategies since inception.

In his 4,398 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, Mr. Nelson describes one of his current top portfolio picks:

“I was just talking about gunfire detection; the stock I was referring to specifically is called ShotSpotter(NASDAQ:SSTI), and it’s a good example of a stock that has scored pretty well with how we think. It’s grown rapidly in recent quarters, and it’s generally exceeded analyst expectations. Like I said before, they sell gunfire detection technology, mostly to police departments throughout the United States.

As it turns out, about 80% of gunfire goes unreported. Police departments can use ShotSpotter’s technology to accurately identify the location of gunfire and, like I said, proactively send officers to the scene to try to resolve situations that might be hostile or to gather evidence and really just to show the community they’ve got their back and that they’re present.

It really helps with community relations.

If you think about our two key criteria — sustainable growth and underestimated growth — one thing we like about ShotSpotter is it’s being sold in about 100 U.S. cities today, but in theory, it could be used in closer to 1,500 U.S. cities.

That’s a lot of runway for them to have a sustainable growth profile, and so that’s very attractive to us. We want to find stocks where there’s a sort of open-ended situation like that where they can, at least theoretically, grow for many years going forward.”

Get more top picks from Mr. Nelson, as well as his detailed methodology, exclusively in his 4,398 word interview in the Wall Street Transcript.