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Back to School - Time for beaten down Stocks!

I went into summer hibernation from updating my blog. After Modi's spectacular win, I could not find interesting enough topic for me to come out my hibernation and write about it.
Finally now kids are back in school, summer trips are over, it's time for me to get into blog-writing mode. Yesterday I started auditing course at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley (along with my friend). That is also motivation for me to write my blog which I started during my MBA days.
Markets are all time high. Nasdaq is within teen percentage of all time high and it's just matter of time (most likely in early part of 2015) when Nasdaq would break it's all time record. So in such exuberant markets, what should an investor do? Go with the flow and invest in markets, sell all holdings and sit tight in cash (which may not be a bad decision given historically scary months of Sept/Oct) or pick-n-choose your stock selections.
I am leaning towards 3rd option. While in long-run, efficient market theory work, in short-run, behaviors of individuals (and markets which are made of we all irrational people) play much strong role. This is where stock-picking opportunities would come. I won't claim I am good at it but I could make an attempt. After all one has to make his/her own decisions while investing real money. With that in mind, today's theme is "beaten down" stocks due to various factors. These companies got hammered due to change in strategy (Sprint - S) , investments going bad (Portugal Telecom - PT) or market factors (VIP). But as long as these companies survive, there is strong chance that these investments could return between 25 to 50% by Dec 2015. Here are 10 such stocks and prices at which they could make good entry points:

  1. Sprint (S): $5 to $5.50
  2. Portugal Telecom (PT): $1.70 to $1.90
  3. Vimpelcom (VIP): $8.40 to $8.80
  4. Covisiant (COVS): $4.40 to $4.90
  5. Rite-aid (RAD): $6 to  $6.50
  6. Bank of America (BAC): $15.5 to $16
  7. Alcatel (ALU): $3.20 to $3.30
  8. National Bank of Greece (NBG): $3.30 to $3.40
  9. Jive Software (JIVE): $6.90
  10. RenaSola (SOL: $2.60
Many of these are high-beta stocks so you need to be careful while investing. However if you do your own research and come to conclusion that these companies would survive (using common sense approach), you could possibly make investments and sell covered calls every quarter which are 10-20% above stock price. Regarding details about covered-calls, you can check out my previous post 
Hope you had great summer!
/Shyam

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