4 top stocks that are suddenly real cheap
The deafening hiss we've been hearing for the past five weeks was the air going out of the U.S. stock market at the end of the second quarter.
The Standard & Poor's 500 Index lost 11.4% for the last three months, even after taking dividends into account. But to me, things seem less grim than many investors think. Stock buyers are fixated on whether we are about to have a double-dip recession. Double-dips are rare creatures, and not the most likely outcome in my view. Besides, investors seem to forget that in the past 70 years we have gone through World War II, a cold war, the Vietnam War, the 2001 terrorist attack, the AIDS crisis and numerous recessions. And yet for the 70 years from 1940 through 2009, the U.S. stock market has provided a compound annual return of 10.8%.
For those who still have the nerve to buy equities, I present my quarterly Casualty List -- a roster of stocks that have been banged up severely and that I think can recover and go on to new heights.
[John Dorfman, chairman of Thunderstorm Capital in Boston, is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own. His firm or clients may own or trade securities discussed in this column. Photos in the following slides courtesy of Bloomberg]