Every day, the sun rises on Wall Street, and a plethora of professional analysts wake to issue new opinions on stocks. Here at the Fool, we use our "This Just In" column to examine some of these picks -- and the track records of the companies behind them -- so individuals can make better investing decisions.
In addition to following these professional banks, anyone can use Motley Fool CAPS to monitor the collective opinions of more than 115,000 members, many of whom demonstrate better investing insight than published analysts do.
Lately, enough top-performing CAPS members have turned bullish on electric utility Southern (NYSE: SO ) to upgrade it from its four-star rank to the highest level of five stars. A total of 408 members have given their opinion on Southern, with lots of analysis and commentary on the company.
A nice dividend that yields 4.4% and consistently stable earnings have been comforting to a jittery market dealing with volatility in many commodities. Like Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK ) -- which investors are also feeling more bullish about -- Southern is benefiting from its focus on the robust southeast U.S. market, which is seeing higher job growth than the national average. This regional focus helped Southern avoid most of the continuing economic pain in its recent second quarter, and it actually added 40,000 customers since last year.
While solar deals such as First Solar's (Nasdaq: FSLR ) forays in California and Solarfun's (Nasdaq: SOLF ) supply deals in Europe may leave investors wondering whether Southern is missing the solar trend, there's a good reason. Southern doesn't see solar and wind as viable sources of energy in its Southeastern markets but prefers to invest in other nonfossil sources such as geothermal, biomass, and nuclear.
On top of the energy business, there are a few "bonus" businesses within Southern -- including the wireless communications business SouthernLINC, which stacks up against Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S ) and carves a niche against national competitors like AT&T (NYSE: T ) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ ) .
To see what the very best CAPS analysts are saying now about Southern -- as well as other winning stocks they are picking -- head on over to CAPS and have a look. It's free and easy.
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