Hey there, Fools. I've summoned our
Motley Fool CAPScommunity once again to highlight a few
of Thursday's biggest winners among the stocks with
top ratingsof four or five stars:
Company
Yesterday's Gain
Akamai Technologies (Nasdaq:
AKAM)
13.05%
Manitowoc
10.47%
Vale (NYSE: VALE)
10.16%
Alcoa (NYSE: AA)
8.97%
Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE: FCX)
6.43%
There's a reason I selected those notable gainers, as
opposed to other winners making noise on Thursday, like
low-rated
Motorola (NYSE: MOT): Stocks go up all the
time, but unless you were able to predict the pop, what does
it matter? Â
Our community of more than 140,000 CAPS Fools considers
its high-star stocks the most likely to outperform the
market.
Written in the (five) stars?
For example, 96.3% of the 2,717 members who've rated
Motley Fool Rule Breakers
pick
Akamaihave a bullish opinion of the stock. In
late July
,
one of those Fools,
PaloAltanFool, pressed our community to pounce on some
second
-quarter softness:
One weak quarter is no reason for a business to drop 20%
in a couple minutes. Akamai has a pretty deep moat in that
companies are often unwilling to go with a smaller,
less-reliable [content delivery network]. Akamai is more or
less the industry standard. I see growth prospects, I see a
moat, I see a depressed price.
Akamai is already up 37% since that call. In fact,
yesterday's
double-digit popcame after the company's third-quarter
profit slipped 2% and
stillmanaged to blow out expectations -- consistent
with PaloAltanFool's bargain-based reasoning.
The bullish lesson?
Learn to be
long-term greedywhen others are short-term fearful. Going
against the herd is never easy, but if you truly believe in a
company's
long-runearnings power, massive panic sell-offs can
offer the very
bestpoints of entry
.As
Warren Buffettreminds us, "Only for short-term investors
and market timers is a correction not an
opportunity."
And now for the losers ...
Of course, winning isn't everything in the stock
market.
Here are five of Thursday's biggest decliners with one- or
two-star ratings: Â
Company
Yesterday's Loss
First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR)
16.57%
Strayer Education
Continued... |