Here's a quick look at Artemis as she goes about her business inspecting every inch of the house, rearranging any molecules or atoms she might find along the way.

Today I'll continue with a little stock tip that involves Poker. Recently the World Poker Tour had an IPO. Their ticker symbol is WPTE.

This is pretty interesting on several fronts. First, the World Poker Tour business, poker tournaments and television program contract with The Travel Channel, have both been increasing. They have a nice new contract for several years of shows, and they have lots of tournaments set up. The tournaments are extremely popular and have very large buy-ins. However, I don't know if the World Poker Tour makes any money from the tournament stakes. Obviously the host casinos get some of the profits, and most money put into a tournament is paid back to players.

In any case, whatever the revenues have been from tournaments and television, they are surely growing rapidly now. Poker is on fire, and there is a lot of money to be made from the World Poker Tour brand. In terms of tournaments, these are the most popular tournaments outside of the World Series of Poker. An advantage of the tour is that it has events all over the world; the World Series is only in Las Vegas.

I think it's fair to say that the Tour has a lot of brand awareness and untapped marketing potential. In terms of turning their potential into profits, they are clearly just getting started.

One interesting thing about the stock is that there is already a substantial short interest - today the interest is 17.78%. Since this was an IPO, there were no short shares last month. In other words, almost 20% of the float has already been sold short, in a single month, and the stock is still showing strength - up almost 10% in the last 2 days. I'm no technical analyst, but I know that price inflation in the face of aggressive short selling is a very good sign.

The stock is also held over 78% by insiders. So the people running the company have a lot of interest in seeing it succeed.

The institutional ownership is currently 0%. None. Obviously, this can only increase. The main problem (for institutional investors) is that the market capitalization is under 200M. In other words, this is a small cap company - too small for the big boys to buy a piece. Does this mean it is a bad stock? Not at all. But it does mean the stock will take a while to really grow, since none of the big fund companies can invest, at least for the time being.

I consider this stock a bit of a gamble, but I did buy a small amount. After reading my own analysis, I am thinking of buying more. The short-term downside seems very low - with all the short shares and insider ownership, it doesn't seem to me that there can be hardly any downward pressure on the stock price. On the other side of the scale, any earnings are likely to cause the stock to explode. I don't know if there will be earnings, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me given the business model (the production costs are pretty minimal and the contracts should be more than adequate to ensure a profit).

In all, I think this is a very strong contender for an explosive, risky stock. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this at $50 per share within a year, but then it could flame out if poker popularity decreases. Personally, I don’t see how that could happen given the viral nature of poker popularity. Basically, the only problem with poker is addiction. Surely this is a good thing for the World Poker Tour. Will they screw it up? I don't think so.

Plus, any opportunity to invest in Shana Hiatt is a bonus in my book.