It is perhaps somewhat ironic to call an article under the radar given the way that most of the London market is under the radar as compared to say the US stock market. However, the three stocks today merit further investigation for those who have not so far kicked the tyres. At the very least I have included them today on the basis that they have either been highlighted to me by the great and the good of the London market (admittedly no more than a dozen people), or have stood out in the past week on my travels between Mayfair and the City of London. I mention the City as I dared to venture to the Aquis Showcase on Tuesday, and would like to say that I was overwhelmed by a wave of adulation, having listed a company on the exchange a few years back. Yes, I would really like to have said that… 

Oxford Biodynamics

Oxford Biodynamics (OBD)  has had more than a couple of factors against it over recent years. This is over and above the way that these are biotech shares and were down 94% in 2024, 85% last year and 53% so far this year. On this basis one might have thought that management might have a target on its back among shareholders. In fact, it would appear that after a rather long and winding road, and with the shares near 0.1p, a turning point could be on its way for the now £13m market cap company. This week the shares were in focus initially with the announcement of a delayed settlement to the £9m placing.

Perhaps just as important was the revelation on Thursday that the 3D Genomics Company, has entered into its first commercial agreement with a major pharmaceutical company for the use of EpiSwitch® Orion, its cloud-based 3D genomics platform, as part of a biomarker discovery programme in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Just in case you are wondering, the agreement is with some chaps called Johnson & Johnson and follows OBD's first commercial Orion agreement, with the University of Oxford-led OPTIMISE psoriatic arthritis programme, announced on 28 July 2026. Ordinarily getting into bed with J&J would have seen shares rocket, alongside the phrase “first commercial agreement.” Perhaps it is a case of first bitten, a hundredth time shy? Or people too busy enjoying seeing President Trump squirm in the wake of the midterms. But ODB is worth keeping an eye on from now if only on the basis of another Tier 1 counterparty stepping up to the plate, and yes, the company making money.

Sterling Digital

I like to think that Rainman like I know almost every ticker code / company on the London market, given that I have been involved in the area for over 25 years. I have been helped in recent times by the way that there is an ever-shrinking universe of companies, especially among the small cap space.   Apparently, some people prefer to be private rather than being preyed on by unfettered bearish conspirators and over-priced “service” providers. Seems strange doesn’t it? Nevertheless, for those with a strong enough constitution / decent business plan, the stock market can be a good place. 

This brings me to Sterling Digital  where I thought the code was SEY, but it is in fact ASIC, which keeps it a little more under the radar. “An ASIC is a microchip custom-designed to perform one specific task, rather than a general-purpose chip like a CPU or GPU that can run many different programs.” Who knew?

In a discussion I had this week regarding ASIC, I was reminded that a decade or more so ago the thing as far as Bitcoin was concerned was that enthusiasts would be souping up their PC’s and nicking as much electricity as possible to mine their own. Hopefully this would be done more cheaply than the prevailing price then generally $5,000. Now in 2026 we have seen BTC peak over $100,000. But what is interesting for a company like ASIC which has a cheap gas energy source is that being able to mine the digital asset at say a third of the prevailing $80,000 means that it is turning a tidy profit. But what may be of even more interest is the way that ASIC is now very much old school as compared to the Bitcoin Treasury brigade of MicroStrategy (MSTR) and the copycats that came and generally went on the London market last year. There are of course still a handful of BTC treasury companies extolling the virtue of buying BTC so you don’t have to. But a buy and hope strategy, rather than mining BTC at a massive discount to the prevailing price does seem to be a choice in favour of mining – by quite some distance.

Roadside

While it may be strange to suggest that a stock which has already outperformed in the way that out of down developer Roadside  has in the past couple of years is under the radar, given the newsflow and the success of the concept, the company has still hidden its light under a bushel – relatively speaking. It is also the case that the punters still perform a penny share with a £10m or less market cap, as compared to £1 plus and £100m plus. This is ironic given the way that historically, it is better to wait for the latter than take your chances on the former. As far as ROAD is concerned we have known that CEO Charles Dickson is someone critically aware of his cap table, and keen to maintain a controlling shareholding. The effect of this is to concentrate value in the paper, something which has clearly caught the eye of the great and the good, arguably even greater than myself: Blackrock. Indeed, the financial colossus is in on the shareholder register at 5% this week, replacing a couple of sellers who Mr Dickson mopped up last month. If you think about it the strategy he has been employing with ROAD is exactly the kind of thing that the likes of Blackrock look for: a scalable, long term business, and throwing off cash. We look together to the next leg up for ROAD shares.