Bank of America's (NYSE: BAC ) stock has been absolutely wacky. Existing B of A shareholders aren't particularly happy, because the stock has fallen 30% over the past year. Short sellers who hopped in recently aren't too overjoyed, either, since the stock has jumped nearly 80% from the low it hit in mid-July.
On CAPS, nearly 6,000 investors are following the ups and downs of Bank of America and weighing in on its future. Among those players are some who are sporting an ear-to-ear grin when it comes to B of A despite its crazy volatility. And none is smiling broader than CAPS member jupiterprotan. He has made two calls on B of A in '08 -- a short outperform call from mid- to late January and a more recent outperform call in mid-July. Both calls caught B of A lows, and jupiterprotan has bagged 78 points as a result.
Our jupiterprotan is one of CAPS' All-Stars -- members with a rating of 80 or greater -- and has managed a stock-picking accuracy of 56% on calls while racking up more than 400 points. But Bank of America hasn't been this member's only great call. Here's a look at a few of the other prescient picks from jupiterprotan:
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Company
|
Date Picked
|
Call
|
Points
|
CAPS Rating (5 Max)
|
|
McDermott International (NYSE: MDR )
|
10/5/06
|
Outperform
|
120
|
*****
|
|
LCA Vision (Nasdaq: LCAV )
|
11/30/06
|
Underperform
|
73
|
***
|
|
Nektar Therapeutics (Nasdaq: NKTR )
|
11/30/06
|
Underperform
|
60
|
**
|
Data from CAPS.
So what is this investor looking at these days? Here are a few of this member's most recent calls on CAPS:
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Company
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Date Picked
|
Call
|
CAPS Rating
|
|
Apache (NYSE: APA )
|
7/18/08
|
Outperform
|
*****
|
|
Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL )
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7/16/08
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Underperform
|
***
|
|
Ford (NYSE: F )
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6/19/08
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Outperform
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*
|
Data from CAPS.
No one can know whether all of these picks will pan out, but they could be a good place to start some further research. I decided to take a closer look at Stock Advisor pick Apple.
Apple's juice
In case you hadn't noticed, Apple is one of the best stocks you could have owned between mid-2003 and today. By that, I mean that if you were one of the lucky owners of Apple stock over the past five years, you're sitting on gains in the 1,500% range. Now that's cause for bragging rights.
How'd Apple do it? Well, it went from being an also-ran in the market for PCs to creating a mold-breaking MP3 player that has taken over the market. Nowadays, it's rare that someone will say he or she is listening to an "MP3 player" -- it's an iPod, even if it's not an Apple product. And Apple has leveraged its success in the MP3 market to aggressively jump on the smartphone market and get more eyeballs on its computers. (That's right -- it still sells computers!) This strategy has transformed Apple from a company that was inching along and barely profitable to one that's growing in leaps and bounds and sports a fat 15% net margin.
But as always, the market cares very little about what Apple did and is squarely focused on what it will do. Analysts are pretty bullish on this front -- on average, they think the company will be able to grow earnings by 24% over the next five years. Based on the stock's current price-to-earnings multiple of 30, we can assume that investors have a pretty positive view of Apple's future as well.
With such a rich multiple, though, is there really room for investors to still make money? It's all going to depend on whether Apple is able to continue hitting its growth stride and whether investors will continue to be willing to pay similar multiples for the stock. If we assume that Apple is able to grow earnings by 20% over the next five years, investors stand to make almost 11% per year even if the P/E multiple falls to 20. Of course, with a high multiple and big growth estimates, there's also a lot of room to miss expectations and leave investors disappointed.
There's no shortage of opinions about Apple on CAPS. More than 18,000 CAPS members have weighed in on Apple's stock, and the vast majority fall into the bullish camp. A lot of players have been scared off recently by the rumors surrounding Steve Jobs' health, but there are as many, if not more, who think the health concerns are overblown and creating a buying opportunity. CAPS member jandaman9999 recently gave the stock a thumbs-up and kept his reasoning nice and simple, by calling Apple a "proven market leader with superior products, innovative concepts, and name brand recognition."
So what's your take on Apple? Get in the action by heading over to CAPS. The service is absolutely free and already has more than 110,000 stock pickers chipping in to find the best stocks out there.
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