Big tech is wobbling. The Russell 2000 isn't.
That split has sent investors hunting through smaller names for value the mega caps stopped offering months ago. James Early, who runs research at Curia Financial and models his stock-picking on Warren Buffett's approach to durable, cash-generating businesses, laid out three small-cap stocks trading under $10 a share, each profitable and built on fundamentals rather than hype.
Mega-cap tech's loss has become small-cap America's gain, and these three names show why.
Part of the appeal of a sub-$10 stock is simple math: a few hundred dollars buys a lot more shares than it would in a $200 name. Fractional shares have made that distinction less important than it used to be, but Early's advice still holds—don't anchor too much on price alone. What matters is whether the business underneath is worth owning.
Home Health Care Draws Insurer Interest
Aveanna Healthcare Holdings (NASDAQ: AVAH) provides in-home care for complex and expensive patient cases, with Medicare and Medicaid making up roughly 91% of revenue. Home-based care costs a fraction of hospital monitoring, and insurers have taken notice.
Aveanna Healthcare delivered 16% revenue growth over the past year and raised its guidance twice, evidence that demand is outrunning even management's own expectations. The company operates across dozens of U.S. states.
Early sees this as a potential buyout target rather than a moonshot. At a roughly $2 billion market cap, a larger insurer, home health platform, or private equity firm could easily absorb it. The stock has already climbed more than 120% over the past year, but Early argues that run-up matters less for a company this small: institutions can't buy in size without moving the price, which leaves room for retail investors to get in before Wall Street can.
Healthcare overall has lagged its potential in recent years, overshadowed by AI enthusiasm. But roughly 18% to 19% of U.S. GDP flows through healthcare spending, and an aging population isn't a trend that quickly reverses. That demand tends to hold up even in a downturn, since medical care is one budget line people don't cut.
An Ugly Legacy Business Funds a Clean One
Genworth Financial (NYSE: GNW) splits into two very different businesses.
The first is its roughly 82% stake in Enact Holdings (NASDAQ: ACT), which sells private mortgage insurance in a market growing about 8% annually. That segment runs at a 55% net profit margin, funding the second bucket: a closed book of long-term care policies written decades ago and badly underpriced, still costing the company $300 million to $400 million a year.
That drag is finite. Genworth trades around a PE of 17, below the S&P 500 average, and the stock has climbed steadily over the past five years as the Enact business has carried the load. Early is drawn to exactly this kind of complexity: a company that looks messier from the outside than it performs on the inside.
Growth here won't be explosive. Early expects something closer to 10% to 12% annually, tracking a mortgage insurance market that grows faster than GDP but isn't reinventing itself. What Genworth has demonstrated, through both rising and falling rate environments, is that the pivot already worked. The stock hasn't moved much with rate swings, and Early argues a softer rate environment ahead, with more housing inventory, could help rather than hurt.
A 1990s Survivor Bets on AI
eGain Corporation (NASDAQ: EGAN) has been around since 1997. Founded by Ashu Roy, the customer relationship management software company went public in 1999, then lost nearly all its value before a reverse split kept it listed. It has quietly stayed profitable for decades on $80 million to $90 million in annual revenue.
Now eGain is repositioning itself as an AI customer service platform, and early data is notable: non-AI customer retention is around 101%, while AI-driven retention is near 116%. Clients include the IRS, JPMorgan Chase & Co (NYSE: JPM), and other large enterprises.
The stock has fallen from roughly $15 a year ago to the mid-single digits, tracking the broader software sell-off as the market debates whether AI helps or guts software companies. Early argues the labor-intensive nature of customer service makes AI a net positive here, not a threat, and that eGain's three-decade profitable base offers a floor even if the AI bet takes time to play out. He's still clear-eyed about the risk: this is a micro-cap that can swing sharply for no obvious reason, and he keeps positions like it small, often under 1% of a portfolio.
The Risk and the Upside
The upside in small caps and micro caps is real: institutions largely can't compete for shares, leaving retail investors an edge that mostly disappears once a company gets bigger. The risk is real, too, and it's larger than most investors assume. Research from Arizona State University professor Hendrik Bessembinder, covering nearly a century of U.S. stock market data, found that just 4% of publicly traded companies accounted for all of the market's net wealth creation above cash returns. The rest, collectively, did no better than holding Treasury bills.
That's the case for keeping any single small-cap bet modest, no matter how strong the story. Stay disciplined on position size, because that's what determines whether a good idea turns into a good outcome.
The article "3 Small-Cap Stocks Trading Under $10 With Room to Run" first appeared on MarketBeat.
