Return To 'Twin Peaks' With These Lynchian Stock Picks

Following a running trend of decades-old movies and television properties finding new life on today’s screens, "Twin Peaks," the long-dormant ABC property from idiosyncratic director David Lynch and novelist Mark Frost, is making its anticipated return to television on May 21 as a mini-series on the Showtime network.

According to a 2014 Variety interview with Frost, the series, which ran for two seasons on ABC between April 1990 and June 1991, is set to pick up 25 years after the original run’s abrupt end.

Abrupt because the final broadcast episode concluded on a cliffhanger involving the series’ major protagonist, FBI Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle McLaughlin.

Since then, the show had an additional entry in the form of a feature-length film, "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me." However, like many of Lynch’s works, the film left audiences with more questions than answers and acted as more of an appendix to the series than an actual continuation or conclusion.

With the Showtime series, and the return of many of the show’s original cast, fans are hopeful to finally have a sense of finality to the many loose threads left among the eclectic characters of the of the show’s namesake mysterious northwestern town. Whether that will be the case, given Lynch’s mind-bending body of work, is up for debate.

In anticipation of the "Twin Peaks" return, Benzinga has collected some of the most “Lynchian” stocks to add a bit of the surreal to your portfolio.

What does it mean to be Lynchian? For those unfamiliar, David Lynch’s films, as well as "Twin Peaks" itself, generally feature elements of the mundane or cliché pieces of Americana that are emphasized and exaggerated to the point that they become uncanny and, basically, kind of creepy.

Below are three of the best examples of the stocks we think the residents of Twin Peaks might have added to their portfolios in the intervening 25 years.

Collectors Universe, Inc. CLCT

Having a collection is an admirable hobby and a genuinely healthy way to spend your time. But nothing can be more mundane, and even off-putting, than having someone run you through their assortment of early 20th-century baseball cards or coins from exotic lands. To build a publicly traded business around appraising thousands of those items requires a high degree of attention and a complete absence of insincerity.

Collectors Universe stock has had a mixed performance in previous years, but it came into 2017 strong, cresting at $27.92 — a level it hasn’t traded at since shortly after its IPO late in 1999.

CTI Industries Corp. CTIB

CTI Industries produces foil and plastic film used primarily in the manufacture of balloons and novelty packaging. The brightly colored accessories and intricately-shaped balloons produced in bulk by the company celebrate everything from births to anniversaries to Boss’ Day.

The myriad celebrations and occasions recognized by CTI’s stable of products is both admirable and profound when you consider how many of these party accessories you’ve seen in supermarket aisles destined to either commemorate their particular joyous event or left to deflate without brightening an administrative professional’s special day.

Share price in CTI has had an upswing in recent months, peaking to a five-year high over $7 in mid-2016, but correcting slightly to trade between $5.50 and $6 through most of 2017.

Matthews International Corp MATW

This may be stretching our definition of “Lynchian,” but it seemed criminal not to include Matthews International based solely on the merits of how surreal its horizontally integrated business holdings appear from the outside.

Matthews International is composed of three business segments, SGK, which provides brand development and marketing design services, Matthews Industrial, which is an industrial printing and solutions business that also offers warehouse fulfillment systems, and Matthews Memorialization, which manufactures and sells caskets, crematoria and other funerary products and services.

The dual marketing/funeral operations Matthews provides may not strictly be the kind of everyday strangeness that Lynch typically revels in, but the convenient alignment of the services does have an unironic practicality that wouldn’t feel out of place in "Twin Peaks."

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Image Credit: David Lynch, Thiago Piccoli