Even on the market's worst days, buyout news and other short-term forces can send individual stocks up by 10%, 25%, even 50%.        

For example, shares of Starent Networks jumped 17% when it was announced that Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) had gone on another buying bingeand offered $2.9 billion in cash for the company.

But beyond less-predictable events like that one are stocks with fundamentally compelling reasons for recent momentum. The trick is to find those stocks. That's where Motley Fool CAPScomes in.

The story behind the story
CAPS is no crowd of lemmings. Its best-performing members' opinions do more to shape each company's ratingthan the picks of their poorer-performing peers. Let's use the collective wisdom of more than 140,000 CAPS members to filter out the noise and find companies offering strong momentum.

We'll use CAPS' handy stock screening toolto quickly zero in on companies with a stock price increase of at least 25% in the past four weeks, a market cap of greater than $100 million, and a betaof less than 3. Below is a sample of stocks that our screen returned. If you'd like, run this screen yourself-- just keep in mind that results may change as the market does.

Company

CAPS Rating
(Out of 5)

4-Week
Price Change

KV Pharmaceutical

*****

47.1%

Focus Media (Nasdaq: FMCN)

*****

37.9%

Headwaters

****

28.7%

Alpha Pro Tech (AMEX: APT)

** Continued...