Nassim Nicholas Taleb's best-selling book The Black Swan is probably loaded with more good advice than any other single source available. Read the book a few times, and you'll have a better understanding of risk and uncertainty than the vast majority of fancy-pants financial experts.

One common theme from the book is focusing on the ability to separate the empirical from the emotional. Sifting out the noise from the numbers -- the significant developments from the total ballyhoo. It's one of the most important lessons to remember.

Especially in a market like this, where fear, uncertainty, and raw emotion are in the driver's seat. More investment opportunities are being created from market temper tantrums than we've seen since the Great Depression. The trick to finding great investments -- and the kind of behavior that's made investors like Warren Buffett madly successful -- lies in shoving aside emotional barricades and focusing on the empirical facts. It's anything but easy, but the results are rarely disappointing.

To find a few stocks whose empirical details far outweigh their emotional fears, I called on the wisdom of our 135,000-member-strong CAPS community. In my opinion, these three stocks have too much fear and too little fact baked into their current prices:

Company

1-Year Return

Recent Share Price

Forward P/E Ratio

TTM Return on Equity

CAPS Rating   
(5 max)

ConocoPhillips (NYSE: COP)

(54%)

$40.31

6.5

(28.1%)

*****

Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS)

(15%)

$143.21

10.0

4.3%

**

Waste Management (NYSE: WMI) Continued...