Meet the 20/20 Club

I'm not sure I've made this particular confession before, but in addition to my CAPS addiction, I'm also a small-cap junkie.

At the Fool, we've routinely outlined all sorts of reasons to be gung-ho about small, overlooked businesses. They're more likely to be mispriced. They're able to dominate a niche. Perhaps most compelling of all is that the 10 best stocks of the past decade all started out tiny. There's just so much more room to grow from a small base.

While I'm drawn to these features, I'm also repelled by some characteristics of very large organizations. There's the lack of personal accountability. There are the jets and lavish "pay for pulse" compensation packages. Then there's just plain old entropy -- take the unraveling of Citigroup (NYSE:C) for an example of the latter.

It's an incredibly difficult thing to maintain the favorable characteristics of a small organization when you grow into a large-cap leviathan. But it is possible. Getting back to the matter of accountability, I'm inclined to believe that the secret sauce is an ownership culture.

20/20 vision
If you read my article on the capital-sucking vortex known as Japan, you know I've been having fun with stock screens lately. Well, here's another interesting one. To find the perfect mix of large-sized companies with small-company accountability, I've scoured the market for $20+ billion companies that sport at least 20% insider ownership.

In the U.S., I've identified only five such companies. I dub this group the 20/20 Club:

Data provided by Capital IQ, a division of Standard and Poor's.

If we take the search global, we expand our list to include intriguing businesses like Cheung Kong and Hennes & Mauritz (aka H&M), but only modestly. I'm personally not quite ready to take the plunge at the large-cap end of the pool, but if I fall out of love with tiny stocks someday, I know I'll be looking at the sort of firms outlined above.