Editor's note: The world's greatest investors often can't find them.

Neither can the $25,000-a-year Bloomberg Terminal.

But as you'll learn in this weekend's Masters Series, incredibly lucrative opportunities are out there, "hiding" in plain sight... and individual investors like you can take advantage of them, if you just know where to look.

In the first installment of this exclusive two-part interview, Stansberry Venture Value editor Bryan Beach discusses two of the "blind spot" setups he has found...

How to Find Wall Street's 'Blind Spots'

An interview with Bryan Beach, editor, Stansberry Venture Value

Sam Latter: Bryan, you've been working on a project with Stansberry Venture Value to uncover "blind spots" in the stock market. What exactly does that mean?

Bryan Beach: When professional investment analysts like my team and me look at financial data, we rely heavily on publicly available information, which we access mainly via our Bloomberg Terminal. The Bloomberg data is almost always reliable, but it's not perfect – not for every company, anyway – and that's where these blind spots come in.

Sam: For the uninitiated, what exactly is a Bloomberg Terminal?

Bryan: It's really an amazing machine. It can pull pretty much any financial metric you can imagine for almost every publicly traded company, with financial information going back until at least the mid-1990s. Suffice it to say, it's worth every penny of the roughly $25,000 it costs per user per terminal every year.

Sam: How do analysts like you use the terminal to generate investment ideas?

Bryan: There are lots of ways, but most numbers guys like me use the terminal to build stock screens. For example, you can build a screen to show you all of the large companies that generate more cash flows than they pay out in dividends. Or you can build a screen to show you all of the small, cash-generating companies that have more tangible assets than debt on their books.

You can basically screen for any criteria imaginable. Of course, there are lots of other screening tools out there. Some are even free on the Internet. But in terms of reliability and completeness of the data set, the Bloomberg Terminal is in a league of its own. It's what all the pros use.

That said, there are thousands of publicly traded companies out there. And Bloomberg isn't perfect. That's why we have the opportunity to identify those market blind spots.

Sam: So you can use Bloomberg to find things like capital-efficient stocks, which your team regularly recommends in Stansberry's Investment Advisory.

But you've said that certain types of companies have blind spots, so they don't show up on these stock screens. Can you walk us through the types of blind spots?

Bryan: Blind spots fall into one of a few categories.

The first is "dark companies." These are firms that aren't filing financial statements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"). They're publicly traded, but they're traded on an over-the-counter ("OTC") exchange instead of the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE"). And if they aren't filing SEC financial statements, they don't show up in the Bloomberg Terminal, because SEC financial statements are the source for Bloomberg or any financial data aggregator.

These dark companies are out there... They have customers, revenue, and they're making money. But anybody who is only using a stock-screening tool is going to miss them every time.

I have a lot of personal experience with dark companies. As a certified public accountant, I worked for years as an auditor with the Big Four accounting firms, and I had a couple of clients going through accounting restatements. This happens when a company has to go back and make corrections to its previously filed numbers. While they're doing that, they can't issue current financial statements. Sometimes, these restatements can take years.

In fact, I was later a controller at a publicly traded company that was purchased by another public company that was going through a multiyear restatement. While that was happening, we couldn't issue our current financial statements. Investors were completely oblivious to our company's prospects and how we were doing. We were actually having some great years, but our share price went down 90% over the course of three years while we were busy with our restatements.

As the controller, it was interesting... I was reviewing these huge contracts every quarter – that is, big new orders coming in. I knew we had plenty of cash flowing in the door, but the investing community had no way of knowing this.

I found it fascinating knowing that great companies exist out there but due to extenuating circumstances, they're dark and investors are missing them altogether. These situations are unusual. I'm following two of them right now that are in various stages of the process.

Sam: In fact, you recommended one of these companies in the December issue of Venture Value issue. Your readers are already up more than 15%. Can you walk us through the backstory with this company and how you first discovered it?

Bryan: It's a manufacturing company that had decent growth and cash flows. It was always cash-flow positive, heading into about 2014. Then, the company experienced some accounting irregularities – some key accountants weren't on the up-and-up. The company had to make some personnel changes. But when we looked closely at what had happened, the types of errors we found weren't the kinds of things that affected the business as a whole, or its cash flows.

We felt like this was probably a strong business. But from 2015 to 2017, the company was completely dark. Investors gave up, sending the share price down about 80%. That's when it caught my attention. You see, if you go enough quarters without filing financial statements, you have to delist from a major exchange. This company was listed on the NYSE and had to delist. That's a big problem, because it means all of the institutional money – mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, etc. – can't own stocks that are traded OTC.

As a result, we saw a lot of forced selling, rather than people dumping shares due to the company's fundamentals. Over the next year, the company filed its 2014 and 2015 annual reports. It filed its 2016 annual report in January, which is less than a month after I recommended it to Venture Value readers. At that point, I was confident that the company was going to get everything squared away by about October.

I expect that once the company gets current on its filings and relists with the NYSE, we'll see shares bounce back up to where they were before they got delisted. That would be a gain of almost 100% for my readers.

The thing is, I could have recommended the stock sooner... But I wanted to see that the accounting department was making headway. At this point, the company is only two quarters behind. By October or maybe November, we should see all of the catalysts play out. I'm looking forward to it.

Sam: Now, you've also mentioned that dark companies can include those that aren't even listed with the SEC. How can a company possibly be publicly traded if it's not filing with the SEC?

Bryan: That's a great question. For whatever reason, certain companies out there – and many of them are small banks with one or two branches – don't want to go through the expense and the headaches of being a publicly traded company registered with the SEC. They are similar to private companies in many ways, except that individual investors can go buy shares of them on the OTC exchanges.

Believe it or not, we've found a lot of incredible opportunities in this group of stocks. We're tracking about 40 of them right now. These companies don't double overnight, but they have an impressive track record as a group. Many of them have been grinding higher over the past two or three years. A lot of them go on to double over the course of a few years. They're dark, but unlike the companies that go dark because of accounting restatements, they choose to go dark.

Sam: Can you give us an example of one of these companies?

Bryan: Sure. One great example of this is Scheid Vineyards (SVIN), a company out in Monterey, California. As can might imagine, it grows grapes for making wine. Scheid owns a lot of valuable real estate and valuable wine equipment.

But it's not registered with the SEC, so it's dark. Some smart, small-cap-oriented hedge-fund managers started to buy up shares. The Scheid Vineyards story started to spread. And since last year, shares have more than tripled, from around $30 to nearly $100.

Unfortunately, Scheid is too small for us to recommend in Venture Value. That's actually the case for a lot of dark companies. These types of companies are almost always too illiquid for me to recommend to my readers. But it has been an interesting company to monitor over the last several quarters.

Sam: A second kind of blind spot is two companies with one ticker. Explain what that means.

Bryan: The best way to think about this situation is to think about applying for a mortgage with a bank. Your lender is going to require some information from you – your last tax return, several paystubs, your bank statements and brokerage statement, etc. When you provide this information, the mortgage officer is going to have a good handle on your household finances. Nine times out of 10, that's going to be enough information for the bank to determine whether or not to give you the loan.

But sometimes, circumstances change... and quickly. Say your wife gets a big raise at work, and suddenly your household has doubled its income. Or maybe your parents gift you 1,000 shares of Apple (AAPL). Suddenly, your brokerage statement is going to look much different. And so will your overall financial profile.

While the information you provided the mortgage lender is accurate as of a certain point in time, it's now outdated. Your brokerage statement might not reflect those Apple shares for another couple of months. It might be another year before your tax returns show your wife's new salary.

The same exact thing happens when two public companies merge. Sometimes, a company will buy one of its competitors, and its balance sheet might double overnight. Its earnings potential and expected future cash flows could double overnight, too. But if you're just looking at a Bloomberg Terminal, you won't see any of that potential. You're only going to see the last set of financial statements.

But if you're paying attention, it's not difficult to adjust for these new items and scenarios. The thing is, more than 3,000 small-cap companies are out there, and nobody has the time or manpower to pay attention to all of them. We like to look at these companies that are flying under the radar. It's a fertile hunting ground for these types of blind spots.

Editor's note: In Stansberry Venture Value, Bryan has just identified his latest blind spot opportunity. This company has been "dark" for the past nine years, but that may not be the case much longer.

You see, a major decision involving this company's assets is set to take place in July. When it does, Bryan believes Wall Street is sure to catch on... and push shares up to 185% higher in a matter of months.

In other words, if you're interested... you don't have much time to act. Get all the details right here.