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 in the nation's third-largest coal producer Foundation Coal jumped nearly 21% the day it was announced that its rival, Alpha Natural Resources (NYSE: ANR), would purchase it for $1.4 billion in an all-stock deal.
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 CAPS comes in.
The story behind the story
CAPS is no crowd of lemmings. Its best-performing members' opinions do more to shape each company's rating than the picks of their poorer-performing peers. Let's use the collective wisdom of more than 130,000 CAPS members to filter out the noise and find companies offering strong momentum.
We'll use CAPS' handy stock screening tool to quickly zero in on companies with a stock price increase of at least 30% in the past four weeks, a market cap of greater than $100 million, and a beta of 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
Return
PotashCorp (NYSE: POT)
****
36.3%
Mosaic (NYSE: MOS)
*****
35.2%
Alpha Natural Resources
****
31.2%
BioCryst Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: BCRX) Continued... |