On the Nigerian Exchange Limited, five small-cap stocks have multiplied in value several times over this year, carried upward by retail investors seeking refuge from inflation and drawn by genuine corporate turnarounds in companies long overlooked. The surge — led by names like SCOA Nigeria, R.T. Briscoe, and Berger Paints — reflects both the hunger of ordinary savers for meaningful returns and the peculiar physics of thin markets, where modest conviction can move mountains. Real earnings growth lends the rally a foundation, yet the oldest tension in markets reasserts itself: the distance betw