This basket is being presented in order to take advantage of the “Best Months” of the year (November through April/June) for stocks. We will look to add these 17 stocks, in the table below, near current levels or on minor dips. Many of the positions did weaken in today’s mixed trading session and are likely to open tomorrow below their respective suggested buy limits. As a reminder, the buy limit is our suggested maximum price to pay. For tracking purposes, we will allocate a hypothetical $4000 from the cash position in the Almanac Investor Stock Portfolio to each position. When considering your own allocation, please consider these stocks to be a portion of the growth equity in your portfolio.
For each stock we have provided the ticker, name, sector, general business description, PE, price-to-sales ratio, market value, current price, a dividend yield and a suggested buy limit and stop loss. There is also a link above the table to download the table in an Excel file (.xls format). This should aid importing and researching these stocks as most trading platforms and research software have support to import a stock list.
These 17 stocks all have reasonably solid valuations as well as revenue and earnings growth. Most also exhibit positive price and volume action as well as other constructive technical and chart pattern indications. The group of 17 covers a broad array of sectors and industries. It also runs the gamut of market capitalization with a mix of large caps with more than $5 billion in market value, midcaps in the $1-5 billion range, and small caps under $1 billion. There may even be a name or two that you are already familiar with.
To arrive at this list of 17, we first sifted through the universe of U.S. traded stocks for those with a market cap of at least $100 million and average daily volume of 100,000 shares or more on average over the past twenty trading sessions. Then we winnowed the list down to only those stocks with relatively low price-to-sales and price-to-earnings ratios with some exceptions. A special nod was given to stocks with a below average number of analysts following them.
We then dug into numerous individual company charts before settling on these final 17 stocks. Our underlying theme was to find reasonably priced stocks that appear to be growing sales and earnings while flying somewhat under the radar with only a limited number on The Street paying close attention to them. As market valuation goes higher, this becomes increasingly challenging, and a history of earnings surprises and estimates becomes even more important.
At the end of the screening process, we were left with a reasonably diverse basket. The computer and technology and financial sectors are well represented with four stocks each, but the remainder of the basket includes consumer discretionary, materials, construction, transportation, business services and industrial products related stocks. We did not search specifically for top-performing stocks within any specific sector, this just happens to be what remained after our process.