Round-number levels don’t really mean anything in the share market, but they’re important to humans. So, here’s another collection of highly interesting stocks, laden with potential, from very different industries – but all currently under 50 cents in price.
- ClearView Wealth (CVW, 49.5 cents)
Market capitalisation: $323 million
12-month total return: –10.4%
3-year total return: –9.1% a year
Analysts’ consensus target price: 79 cents (Stock Doctor, one analyst); 67 cents (FN Arena, one analyst)
ClearView Wealth started out as NRMA Life in 1976, providing life insurance to NRMA customers. After a few changes in shareholders, in 2010 the company emerged as Clearview, a financial services company offering financial advice and a portfolio of insurance and investment solutions. Since 2022, ClearView has sold its financial advice and wealth management and focused on its core business, life insurance.
The company made that decision because it believes Australians are significantly under-insured, by up to $25 billion – and there is a big opportunity to sell life insurance into that gap. The need for life insurance is underpinned by higher interest rates, population growth and increasing levels of household wealth and debt, it said. The company’s ambition is to be the “best at retail advised life insurance” in the Australian market. That is a big addressable market: the Australian retail life insurance market has an addressable market of about $10billion in in-force premiums (in the context of life insurance, ‘in force’ means the premiums are being paid and the insured party remains alive.)
In the year to 30 June 2024, ClearView saw its life insurance underlying net profit surge by 23% to $39.5 million, with the margin increasing from 9.9% to 11%. Gross premium income increased by 10.1%, to $358.1 million. The company held 3.5% of the in-force premium market share, valued at $373.9 million, up 10.2%. In FY24, the industry saw increasing year-on-year life insurance sales across the whole life industry, for the first time in several years.
ClearView is a strong cashflow generator with a healthy balance sheet. Its FY24 net capital generation before tax figure was up 23% to $32 million, approaching three times the FY22
level of $12 million. Meanwhile, the company’s excess capital position strengthened to $27 million in FY24 from $19 million in FY23.
ClearView has FY25 guidance in the market for gross premium income of $395 million–$400 million, and a life insurance underlying net profit margin of 9%–10%; and it has also given the market “goals: for FY26 of gross premium income of up to $440 million, and a life insurance underlying net profit margin of 11%–13%. In May, CVW said that since the half-year (that is, in calendar 2025 to date) gross premium income was up 9%, to $286 million (it rose 12% in the March 2025 quarter) and total in-force premiums were up 9%, at $398 million. The company appears to be well on track for its life insurance underlying net profit margiFY26 target range (11%–13%). On broker Morgans’ estimates, this implies earnings per share (EPS) growth of about 50% into FY26, with the stock trading on a forward-looking price/earnings (P/E) ratio of just over 6 times FY26 earnings.
ClearView is a high-quality player in an industry that is structurally under-penetrated and is growing on that basis. Taking the company’s guidance at face value, it looks to be a very cheap stock. Analysts don’t expect a dividend this year (FY25), but if CVW pays a four-cent fully franked dividend in FY26, as analysts expect, there is an estimated fully franked yield of more than 11% to augment the total-return prospect.
- BlinkLab (BB1, 41 cents)
Market capitalisation: $41 million
12-month total return: 28.1%
3-year total return: n/a (listed April 2024)
Analysts’ consensus target price: n/a
BlinkLab, a company founded by neuroscientists at Princeton University, is a digital healthcare business that has developed a smartphone-based diagnostic platform for neurological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyper-activity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia, and other neuro-developmental conditions.
BlinkLab’s most advanced product is an autism diagnostic test, Dx1, that leverages the power of smartphones, AI and machine learning to deliver screening tests specifically designed for children as young as 18 months old. The company’s patented technology involves a smartphone app that delivers auditory cues – specific sounds or beeps – while the subject faces the screen. The app captures facial reactions, and records the subject’s reflexive eye-blink reactions, looking for a digital biomarker for autism.
The app is built around the known fact that individuals with autism and ADHD often exhibit different responses to unexpected sounds – such as blinking more frequently or differently compared to neuro-typical individuals. The subject’s facial features and minuscule facial reflexes and reactions are tracked on the smartphone and transferred to the BlinkLab platform; any digital biomarkers are detected in real-time and made available to the clinician. The BlinkLab technology has been validated in more than 8,000 subjects tested around the world.
Why the BlinkLab platform is an exciting prospect in the field of neurology is that the current methods for diagnosing autism often occur typically around the age of 5-6, missing the crucial early intervention window that is known to significantly improve outcomes for children. Typical diagnostic approaches are prone to subjective human judgement – which can lead to errors – and involve input from multiple specialists, taking multiple years. This can lead to autism diagnosis on average at around five years of age, which is often too late for early intervention methods that have been proven to work and save significant costs for the health care system
BlinkLab can deliver a more accurate diagnosis much earlier, at 18 months, and more cheaply, and bring a child into the early intervention window: while there is no cure for autism spectrum disorder, getting treated early can greatly improve communication, functional, behavioural and social skills and IQ, and improve the level of autonomy reached by the individual.
Shortening the time to diagnosis for ASD in children will help to lower the eventual cost burden for ASD treatment both for sufferers, their families and the overall healthcare system.
Autism is a huge market, affecting 1 in 54 children in the US, with an estimated value of around US$700 billion. Healthcare expenses associated with autism are also rising steeply round the world. In Australia, 35% of NDIS participants have autism, accounting for an $8.4 annual billion spend in paid support. The economic cost of disorders such as ASD and ADHD is mainly driven by special education needs and loss in parental productivity.
The company is also developing BlinkLab Dx 2, a diagnostic adjunct that uses the exact same smartphone-tech, app and online portal, but slightly different digital biomarkers generated by a child’s interaction with the smartphone app, to detect possible indicators of ADHD – a significantly larger market opportunity, due to its broader patient base.
At present, BlinkLab is in the process of recruiting subjects for its pivotal US autism diagnostic clinical trial, which will result in a 510(k) submission to the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) in early 2026. The FDA’s 510(k) submission process is a clearance process that every company wanting to bring a medium-risk medical device to the US market must pass through. The company hopes to run a parallel regulatory strategy, bringing Dx2 under the 510(k) pathway: Dx2 is essentially the same core product, but powered by a different machine-learning model that focuses on a distinct set of reflex biomarkers relevant to ADHD. In time, BB1 also plans to enter the EU market.
BlinkLab has the potential to achieve the “network effect” – being the most accurate diagnostic tool, more clinicians will want to use its app versus competitors, and the more people that use its app, the more biomarker data BlinkLab gathers, thus enabling its predictive diagnostic algorithms to become even better, leading to its use growing even more.
Research firm East Coast Research projects US-based autism revenues in the 2026/27 period, with US-based ADHD revenues expected to ramp-up in 2028.
East Coast Research values BlinkLab at $1.53 a share in a base-case scenario, and $1.95 a share in a bull-case scenario. Broking firm Lodge Partners has a price target on the stock of $1.30.
- Humm Group (HUM, 45.5 cents)
Market capitalisation: $224 million
12-month total return: 1.6%
3-year total return: –12.3% a year
Analysts’ consensus target price: 85.5 cents (Stock Doctor, two analysts), 85.5 cents (FN Arena, two analysts)
The former FlexiGroup was actually the first Australian financial services business to launch a buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) product to the Australian market, in 2000, with its Certegy EziPay point-of-sale retail purchase product, which it followed in 2017, with its Oxipay online micro BNPL product, aimed at products that cost $1,000 or less. But it did not grasp the opportunity to ‘own’ BNPL – and then along came Afterpay and Zip Co.
In 2019, the business launched its ‘humm’ BNPL product, consolidating Certegy EziPay and OxiPay into one platform. In 2020, the company decided to unify its product offering and its corporate brand under the name Humm.
Humm is organised in two divisions, Commercial and Consumer. The Commercial business consists of Flexicommercial, which generates 70% of the company’s cash net profit: it is a leading provider of specialist asset finance in Australia and New Zealand, mainly offering equipment finance to growing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the logistics, agriculture and engineering businesses, which help them to fund the purchase of revenue-generating assets – the top three assets being transport, infrastructure and light commercial vehicles. At the end of the March 2025 quarter, flexicommercial had more than $3.2 billion in receivables: in the quarter, flexicommercial grew its assets by 10%, when the broader industry’s assets declined by about 6%; a solid performance.
The Consumer division consists of: Australia Cards; New Zealand Cards, and PosPP: the large-transaction Point-of-sale payment plan (PosPP) product, which is focused on spreading larger-ticket purchases over longer payment periods. The PosPP business operates in Australia, Ireland and Canada, and this financial year, the company is re-entering the UK market, where it has a credit licence. Most of the PosPP portfolio consists of contracts in the solar energy, health and home improvement markets. The New Zealand Cards business is the market leader in NZ, with a market share of more than 10%: it generates 20% of Humm’s cash net profit.
Humm is not widely followed, but the analysts that do follow it see it as absurdly cheap, trading on a June 25 price/earnings (P/E) ratio of 3.9 times earnings, and just 3 times expected FY26 earnings. And if the company, as analysts expect, pays a 2.9-cent dividend in FY25 and a 3.3-cent dividend in FY26, both fully franked, at a share price of 45.5 cents, that would equate to an FY25 grossed-up yield of 9.1%, rising to 10.4% in FY26. You can certainly make the case for buying HUM on those numbers.
