5 Top Stocks at Half-Price

You love buying your shirts when they go on sale. And who can resist a buy-one-get-one-free offer? So when our stocks go on sale, why do we cry about their low prices?

Smart investors like Warren Buffett or Marty Whitman love it when their stocks are suddenly selling at bargain-basement prices. For them, these companies become no-brainer buys.

The investors who populate the Motley Fool CAPS community also like a bargain, apparently. Below, you'll find five stocks whose shares are selling at least 50% below their 52-week highs, but which still earn top honors from our investor-intelligence database. Consider it a BOGO sale on stocks.

Naturally, we want you to look a bit closer at these stocks before buying. You can get low-priced appliances in the dent-and-ding section of your home-remodeling superstore, but their quality might not be so good. Same thing here: Make sure there's nothing seriously wrong with the company before you plug it into your portfolio.

Take two; they're small
With governments flooding their economies with cash, inflation might increase a lot. Typically in such situations, gold becomes the go-to asset. NovaGold would seem perfectly positioned to capitalize on this because it owns stakes in massive gold and copper deposits in British Columbia and Alaska. Unfortunately, it's also struggling to keep its head above water, and another wave threatened to swamp it when the Toronto Stock Exchange began examining it for possible delisting.

NovaGold has seven months to rectify the situation, however, and 50% stakes in two large projects owned by both Barrick Gold (NYSE:ABX) and Teck Cominco (NYSE:TCK), so CAPS member jc09058 sees rapid share-price increases in the near future for the company.

My Grandfather and Father always told me that the time to move in the market was when there was blood on the streets or shortly after bubbles burst. Too many times were they right on that and I'm listening to them. Safety is the major concern right now, financial safety in this case but also future recovery as well. Therefore gold seems to be something worth having and those who mine it.

So, now (relatively speaking) is the time to move. Granted I've made other moves prior to this but this company looks pretty good, Their mines are producing, fresh infusion of cash to work with, severally beaten down share price, and insider and institutional buying makes it real tempting buy.

The coal bin of history
Coking coal producers like Russia's Mechel have struggled with decreasing demand. Analysts expect producers to report a 30% decline in output in the just-finished fourth quarter, followed by an additional 10% drop in the first quarter of 2009. With prices for coking coal plummeting to less than half their peak levels, the earliest market watchers anticipate a turnaround by the second half of next year.

CAPS member kkconway believes the Russian government will not allow Mechel to fall, if for no other reason than it's a big exporter that will bring in much-needed foreign cash. Maybe that was part of the reason behind Mechel borrowing $255 million from the banking arm of the Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom.

This Russian coke (fuel) exporter may be high risk, but since they export, their government will probably support them, or at least they have good reason to leave them alone, so they can bring in much needed foreign currency. When their customers start buying, this has a much higher chance of tripling in price than it does of going to zero.

Have half a mind
It pays to start your own research on these stocks on Motley Fool CAPS. Read a company's financial reports, scrutinize key data and charts, and examine the comments your fellow investors have made -- all from a stock's CAPS page.

Sign up today for the completely free service and tell us whether these stocks are twice as good at half the price.

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