54 Stocks Returning 15%+ in January

Submitted By Trader Mark
As we exit the worst January ever, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the best performers of the past month. Before we do, courtesy of Dshort.com this is a chart that has been passed around a lot in the investing community so I thought I'd share it. Two ways to read this - of the 4 great bear markets the past 100 years, 3 "ended" roughly where we are now... about a 50% loss in value from peak. That's the bullish view i.e. "can't get worse than this" and if we fall to S&P 750 (November lows) but never break through they will be correct.

The bearish view is - the 4th bear market ended in a 90% drop, and if you plot the velocity of the decline, what happened to us in Sep - Nov caused us to be in lockstep with the worst of the 4. I'm not calling for a 90% drop from top to bottom but I believe we'll have a great chance of hitting something closer to 60% then 50% from peak to trough.

Remember what the pundits told you at the end of 2008 (30 days ago) ... time to buy, the calendar is changing and hence its a new start; change is coming, optimism is in the air, stimulus... after a 40% drop in 2008 we cannot just continue to fall. Blah blah & blah. Then January happened. Once again, the punditry just serves to act as sirens and have been destroying people's capital left & right. When we return to a bull market it won't be 45 days or 90 days in duration... there will be plenty of time to partake. While it would be beautiful to catch "the turn" when it really happens, so many people have lost so much money trying to catch it that they won't have the capital to enjoy the actual rebound. Until then, it is best to have much tigher leashes, much shorter time frames and focus on small wins.

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Before the era when the stock market fluctuated +/-8% every month or indeed week, we used to post the best performers of the week to get an idea where the relative strength in the market was. Nowadays, the data is useless as one week every financial will be down 30% and the next week, they'll all be up 20% - which tells us nothing for our time frame.

For the screen, I've had to bring the market capitalization criteria down substantially - before we used to use $1.75-$2 Billion as a minimum. But so many stocks have cratered, I've dropped it down to $500 Million for this pass. 54 Stocks made the cut of making at least 15% in January so while the winning ranks were thin; there were some. Keep in mind, many of these stocks were obliterated late in 2008 so instead of showing "strength" many are just reverting to a mean.

Criteria

Market capitalization $500M+
Average trading volume 100K+
Stock price $10+
Return this month 15%+

Green names we own, blue names we have owned in the past or discussed in the blog. Quite a few at the top are takeovers. The main trend I see were refiners were, after a year of disarray, finally rebounding a bit. A handful of our old energy stocks (HK, FTI) also made a re-emergence but I think this is more oversold action than a new trend so it doesn't fit our time frame. Also, adult "re-education" stocks as we've highlighted have been all the rage - although we successfully booked a profit shorting ITT Educational (ESI) [Jan 22: Bookkeeping: Short ITT Educational] Overall, I am not sure there is much to glean here other than "congrats" if you happened to own some entering the year. I am surprised at the lack of silver/gold stocks on the list...

Symbol Company Name % Price Change Last Month EYE Advanced Medical Optics Inc 219.8 CVTX CV Therapeutics Inc 70.1 NTCT NetScout Systems Inc 54.7 WNR Western Refining Inc 43.1 SYNA Synaptics Inc 38.7 SEPR Sepracor Inc 34.3 RIMM Research In Motion Ltd 33.0 MWE MarkWest Energy Partners L P 31.0 ESI ITT Educational Services Inc 29.9 SNX SYNNEX Corp 29.9 HNT Health Net Inc 28.0 IWOV Interwoven Inc 27.7 SLM SLM Corp 26.2 CYH Community Health Systems Inc 26.2 MDVN Medivation Inc 26.0 SPR Spirit Aerosystems Holdings Inc 25.8 HOC Holly Corp 25.1 TSO Tesoro Corp 25.0 NRGY Inergy LP 24.9 NAV Navistar International Ord Shs 24.3 CREE Cree Inc 23.7 ALJ Alon USA Energy Inc 23.2 IOC InterOil Corp 22.9 STAR Starent Networks Corp 22.6 NJ NIDEC Corp Depository Receipt 22.2 WPZ Williams Partners LP 21.9 SGR Shaw Group Inc 21.8 CECO Career Education Corp 21.8 NFLX Netflix Inc 21.0 KCI Kinetic Concepts Inc 20.4 SVR Syniverse Hldg Inc 20.4 ACOR Acorda Therapeutics Inc 20.0 IVC Invacare Corp 19.9 NRP Natural Resource Partners Units 19.8 AMMD American Medical Systems 19.7 VPRT VistaPrint Ltd 19.5 MS Morgan Stanley 19.1 WDC Western Digital Corp 19.1 SSRI Silver Standard Resources Inc 19.1 HK Petrohawk Energy Corp 19.0 IHS Information Handling Services Inc 19.0 IMA Inverness Medical Innovations Inc 18.7 CPNO Copano Energy LLC 18.0 SVU SUPERVALU INC 17.9 TPP TEPPCO Partners LP 17.7 FTI FMC Technologies Inc 16.9 ARO Aeropostale Inc 16.6 IDCC InterDigital Inc 16.3 OTEX Open Text Corp 16.0 SIRO Sirona Dental Systems Inc 15.9 NTY NBTY Inc 15.8 COCO Corinthian Colleges Inc 15.7 CSTR Coinstar Inc 15.5 TRA Terra Industries Inc 15.2

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