What's Next For Mentor Capital Inc (OTCMKTS:MNTR)?

Mentor Capital Inc (OTCMKTS:MNTR) is one we've come back to on a number of occasions over the last few months. The company is a pretty interesting take on the cannabis sector, and there's the potential (as we've highlighted before) for some long term strength if its strategy pays off.When we last looked at Mentor, it was trading in and around the low $2's. This was a pretty severe discount to the $4+ it logged mid to late February, and we presented the discount as potentially being an opportunity to get in cheap ahead of a recovery to at least the $4 mark, and potentially beyond.Since then, price has dipped a little farther, and Mentor currently trades for around $1.95.So, were we wrong, or is the current price an even cheaper exposure to the above described recovery?Well, this one's a risky play, there's no getting around that. It's an odd model (one we'll look at a little closer shortly) and it seems, for now at least, highly dependent on the skills of one guy – Mentor's CEO Chet Billingsley. Couple this with the fact that its success is – in turn – dependent on the success of cannabis companies that aren’t large enough to command a public market presence on their own, and the risk amplifies. With that said, however, if Billingsley's efforts, and his strategy, pay off, there's a large potential upside on the company's current market cap, and that is enough for us right now to justify a punt-type exposure.Readers can think of this one as a sort of hedge fund type stock. The company (read: Billingsley) initially set up Mentor with the goal of offering a type of bridge to public market capital for small, privately held tech companies. Public market investors buy shares in Mentor, and then Mentor uses the capital it's raised to buy a portion of a small tech company. The tech company gets cash that it otherwise wouldn’t have had access to, and the public markets get to take a position in companies that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.It's not a new model in concept. What is new about it is the application of said model to the cannabis space (which Mentor is now focused on, having pivoted from the tech space last year).Mentor generally buys an aggressive 10-60% stake in the company, and then let's management do its thing with the cash used to buy the stake. If the cash is put to good use, the stake is worth more, and Mentor and its shareholders win.So, we're a few buys into the strategy (as well as an off-kilter position in GW Pharmaceuticals PLC- ADR (NASDAQ:GWPH) that we see as a type of hedge), and Mentor just announced its latest position – a company called G FarmaLabs. This one's a Denver based dispensary, grow facility and branded products setup, and paid $1 million in cash and stock for an undisclosed stake (the assumption is its within the above noted range).Mentor also just announced revenues of $2.7 million during 2016, up from $2.5 million during 2015, and a 2016 net loss of a little over $850K. There's no debt on the books (no non-affiliate debt, that is) and Billingsley himself holds a 22.9% interest, for a total director and officer interest of just shy of 30%.So let's get back to the question – what's our take on this one going forward?Well, we're going to stick to our guns on Mentor. The company has a market cap right now of $34 million, and it's tough to see this staying where it is against a backdrop of recreational industry growth. There's probably some near term political pressure on the cards, and industry uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration's impact on Federal legislation in the space might delay growth, but we think a bull run for MNTR is coming.We will be updating our subscribers as soon as we know more. For the latest updates on MNTR, sign up below!Disclosure: We have no position in any of the securities mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.