There are plenty of strategies for picking stock winners,
from finding low P/E stocks to seeking companies selling at a
discount to their future cash flows. At the small-cap
stock-picking service
Motley Fool Hidden Gems
, even in this market, the analysts are able to stay
ahead of the pack by finding undervalued stocks that Wall
Street and investors have ignored.
But what if we could whittle down our list of prospects
beforehand, to find those whose engines are just getting
warmed up?
Using our investor intelligence database at
Motley Fool CAPS, I screened for stocks that were marked
up by investors
beforetheir share prices rose over the past three
months. (The market as a whole climbed sharply, then traded
sideways, during that same period.) My screen returned 121
stocks when I ran it, no doubt reflecting the market's
continued recovery, and included these recent winners:
Stock
CAPS Rating 4/26/09
CAPS Rating 7/26/09
Trailing 13-week Performance
Akorn (Nasdaq: AKRX)
**
***
11.9%
Alamo Group (NYSE: ALG)
**
****
9.8%
Rambus (Nasdaq: RMBS)
**
***
5.4%
Source: Motley Fool CAPS Screener;
trailing performance from July 24 to Oct. 19.
Alamo
Group, in fact, was previously picked as a stock
ready to runin June. But while this screen might tell us
which stocks we should have looked at three months ago, we'd
rather find
the stocks that we ought to be looking at
today. I went back to the screener and looked
for stocks that were just bumped up to three stars or better,
sport valuations lower than the market's average, and haven't
appreciated by more than 10% in the past month.
Of the 41 stocks the screen returned, here are three that
are still attractively priced, but which investors think are
ready to run today:
Stock
CAPS Rating 7/19/09
CAPS Rating 10/19/09
Trailing 4-Week Performance
P/E Ratio
Best Buy (NYSE: BBY)
**
***
8.2%
17.8
Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM) Continued... |