This article is part of our Rising Star Portfolios Series.
Most investors don't keep tabs on their companies' fundamental value. That's a mistake. If you take the time to read past the headlines and crack a filing now and then, you're in a much better position to spot potential trouble early. Better yet, you'll improve your odds of finding the underappreciated home run stocks that provide the market's best returns.
We can help you keep tabs on your companies with MyWatchlist.com, our free, personalized stock tracking service. Here are three stocks from my watchlist.
1. CAPS Weekly Top Stock Idea: Telefonica (NYSE: TEF )
Each week, I cull a top stock idea from the pitches made on CAPS, the Motley Fool's 170,000-member free investing community. This summer when I started the series, one of the first picks was Telefonica, the Spanish telecom company with significant holdings in Latin America.
Like its competition, Tele Norte Leste (NYSE: TNE ) and Vodafone (NYSE: VOD ) , the company pays a significant dividend, which in its case is 6.2%. The stock has been hurt by worries over the Spanish economy, and I'm hoping the price falls more to the point where I'd be willing to buy in. To see the pitch selected for CAPS' Weekly Top Stock Idea, click here. If you want to follow my weekly picks you can subscribe to the series' RSS feed or follow on Twitter: @CAPSTopStocks.
2. Philip Morris International (NYSE: PM )
There is no denying that Philip Morris has one of the strongest franchises out there. I've even gone so far as to call the company unbeatable. Furthermore, Philip Morris doesn't have near the regulatory risk when compared with Altria (NYSE: MO ) , its former parent. To top it off, the company is currently yielding 4.3%. I still would like to see a lower price before I buy more shares, but this is definitely one for the long term.
3. National CineMedia (Nasdaq: NCMI )
You know when you go see a movie and there are all those annoying ads before it? Well, the cool thing for investors is there is one company that controls 59% of that market. The company's name is National CineMedia, and it's 52% owned by the three largest movie theater companies in the U.S.: AMC, Regal (NYSE: RGC ) , and Cinemark. The company has 27-plus-year agreements with each of them to run ads before movies in the theaters, and this is one of the few areas in the advertising industry that is seeing growth in spending. While the company is currently a little pricey, it raised its dividend for the second time this year to $0.20 a quarter, for a 4% annual yield. This is one to definitely watch.
My Foolish bottom line
If you're looking for more information on these companies, keep checking in on my Rising Star portfolio in the coming weeks as I look further into each of them.
This article is part of our Rising Star Portfolios series, where we give some of our most promising stock analysts cold, hard cash to manage on the Fool's behalf. We'd like you to track our performance and benefit from these real-money, real-time free stock picks. Click here to see all of our Rising Star analysts (and their portfolios).
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