New York- Last weekend, I flew to New York for a friend’s engagement party held in a popular oyster bar that’s a favorite of the beautiful people on Wall Street. The women were straight out of central casting for Sex and the City, while the men, dressed in full-on Brooks Brothers, smacked of Harvard, Wharton and Stanford.

But there was a stocky guy in a double-breasted Italian suit who caught my attention…when I overheard him say in the same sentence: “sex,” “small” and “money.” I never expected that I’d meet at this party an insider who would turn me on to the next big thing in small-cap investments. Especially when the industry is…

Anyway, sitting on one of those retro Nelson Marshmallow sofas, he held court over his minions. He was boasting of his vintage Bordeaux collection, new house in the Hamptons and a huge divorce settlement in which his ex got his new Range Rover. I knew I needed to talk to him — and change the topic of conversation.

Noticing that the bartender had opened a bottle of 1996 Chateau Gloria St. Julien, I ordered a glass and brought it to him. He graciously accepted, and I introduced myself. He invited me to sit beside him.As it turns out, I had heard him right the first time. He called himself an entertainment analyst, and as I had expected, he was on to the next big thing in small-cap investments. Once I established my credentials as a small-cap expert, we hit it off.

He prophesized that porn companies are soon going to be trading on mainstream indexes. “People spend a lot on porn, you know. It’s a big big business,” he said. He predicted that there were going to be a surge of porn IPOs as soon as 2005. “Wait and see,” he said, and winked at me. “We wouldn’t have touched them before, but things might be changing.”

Would our readers really be able to cash in on a slew of new porn IPOs next year? Is porn the next big small-cap idea? I was skeptical, but intrigued. I rushed to work the next day to tell Irwin all about my conversation with the banker. “Lets investigate,” he said.

So we Sleuths delved into the economics of porn…and we came to one interesting conclusion: The entertainment analyst was absolutely right, dear reader. One hundred percent. Here’s what we found…The porn industry grosses $11 billion in annual sales. Family Safe Media reports that porn revenue is larger than the combined revenues of all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises.

Americans spend about $10 million on adult entertainment each year. The entertainment analyst was quite right to call adult entertainment a big, big business. In fact, it’s bigger than big…it was enormous. But here’s the surprise… Even though it is an $11-billion industry, there are only two stocks publicly traded in the major stock exchanges. Playboy (PLA:NYSE) came out with an IPO in 1971, and it’s up so far this year, at $11.93.

Lesser-known New Frontier Media (NOOF:NASDAQ) went public in 1997. In the last two years, the stock is up nearly 700%. There are a few others, but they’re true penny stocks that are traded over the counter. I had to ask myself: Why, out of the scores of porn companies, are only two of them public? And if porn is such a huge business, shouldn’t there be more public companies? To answer this question, I asked myself why companies go public.

Mainly, because they need cash. In other words, public financing. But most adult entertainment companies are cash rich and extremely profitable. New Frontier had $15.4 million in cash last year alone and reported a profit margin of 26.20%. Playboy’s balance sheet shows that it is sitting on $31.3 million of cash.

Frederick Lane, author of Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age, writes, “One of the things about pornography that’s consistently true across the board is that, because there’s a social stigma still attached to it, you can charge a premium for these materials. And because you can charge a premium for it, the profit margin is higher. So it makes pure economic sense.” It does indeed make economic sense. There is no economic reason or real need for outside financing through IPOs. Adult entertainment companies are self-sufficient.

Another reason why porn companies are not mainstream is Wall Street itself. “We wouldn’t have touched them before,” the analyst confided. Wall Street prefers not to be associated with porn. Vivid Entertainment’s president Bill Asher agrees: “Someone like a Goldman [Sachs] wouldn’t touch our business.”

Even companies that do dare to go public are forced to resort to untraditional means. For example, take NuWeb Solutions, an operator of adult Web sites. It trades over the counter and went public through a reverse merger. In this process, a private company merges with an already public but bankrupt shell company. The new entity then makes a second offering of shares. Because no investment bank would touch them, NuWeb had to finagle this backward deal.

So why do we think the (thus far) murky business of adult entertainment is going to emerge from its exile in the investment backwaters? Because of the advent of broadband. America has faced a communications revolution over the last 50 years. Porn was first available only in the print media and shady movie houses. Then the invention of the VCR made videos and movies possible. Then came the Internet. Porn went online. Broadband is next.

Pornography is one industry that has embraced new platforms of communications very efficiently. It is essential to its survival. The Internet is a classic example. Adult entertainment companies have stormed the Internet with such success that they now occupy 4.2 million Web sites, or nearly 12% of the Internet. But in order to take porn to broadband, companies need financing to invest in the technology. We suspect that adult entertainment will start turning to public financing through IPOs.

Vivid Entertainment is one such company. It is in early stages of going public and hopes to use the money to develop technology that will put porn on broadband. Broadband and the Internet is a lucrative mix. Analyst Dennis McAlpine estimates that AT&T Broadband alone makes $180-240 million a year from adult entertainment!

Where will this industry be two years from now? Asher says, “In the last 10 years what you’ve seen is extreme growth simply because of distribution channels’ technologies.” He says the industry has only scratched the surface, and the increase in distribution is going to offer a huge increase in revenues for the industry.

Two years from now, we will see more small-cap porn companies in the market. They are likely to be cash rich, profitable businesses. They will tap into broadband technology for even more profits. And it just might be our friend, the entertainment analyst, who helps take these companies public through traditional Wall Street channels.