5 Top Stocks at Half-Price

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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 bemoan 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 in the Motley Fool CAPS community also like a bargain, apparently. Below, you'll find five companies 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.

Stock	CAPS Rating (out of 5)	% Off 52-Week High
Allied Irish Banks (NYSE: AIB)	*****	84%
ReneSola (NYSE: SOL)	*****	74%
Suncor Energy (NYSE: SU)	*****	51%
Teck Resources (NYSE: TCK)	*****	65%
Weatherford (NYSE: WFT)	*****	59%

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
Having incurred high debt levels from its purchase of Fording Canadian Coal and its Elk Valley coal mines, diversified miner Teck Resources has been holding a garage sale of assets to pay down its debt. In particular, sales of stakes in gold mines to Barrick Gold (NYSE: ABX) and Royal Gold (Nasdaq: RGLD) have been occurring at a furious pace. The collapse of commodity prices had pressured the company's ability to make payments, but if the Chinese economy turns around, that may end up helping the miner out.

Teck Resources says China wants to replace about 180 million tonnes of obsolete coking coal capacity with new production elsewhere. Coupled with demand from elsewhere, Teck Resources ended up selling more coking coal than it had produced. While it has embarked on a course to reduce production, it might rethink that decision because of the prospects for a resurgent industry that has overbooked orders.

Investors are certainly enthusiastic about the prospects. Since the beginning of March, Teck Resources' share price has risen more than fivefold, from less than $3 to more than $17. CAPS All-Star MajorMiner thinks Teck Resources is one of several natural resources companies that will continue to make the grade.

The production of iron ore has become much more profitable over the last decade due to the concentration of market power. Zinc is headed in the same direction with the number [of] sellers decreasing. With the Chinese buying up natural resource companies or hoarding the materials directly (of the two biggest zinc mines in the world, China now has Oz Minerals and Teck has Red Dog) it is [apparent] that China is not taking any chances at letting access to raw materials limit its growth. The other issue is with world inflation. All this "quantitative easing" will hit eventually. My bet is on natural resource companies.

The 195 companies under the Metals and Mining tag on CAPS carry an average four-star rating, and though they lost 31% on average over the past year, they've rebounded more than 15% over the past 30 days.

A crutch for an institution
With a $4.75 billion bailout gift from Irish taxpayers last month, Allied Irish Banks has ceded a 25% interest in its operations to that country's government. As with many of its American counterparts, though, investors have taken to the notion that the bank is simply too big to fail, and if further infusions are necessary, they'll be provided. CAPS member aordinaryguy writes that a complete loss through nationalization is a possibility, but he's backing the alternative for the Motley Fool Global Gains recommendation.

This bank will either get nationalized (and a complete loser) or come back strong and be a multibagger. I'm betting on the too big [to] fail multibagger scenario, but you better throw in a big batch of patience with this one.

Companies carrying the Ireland tag in CAPS have also had a tough time, dropping 46% over the past year, but they've rebounded, rising nearly 32% in the past month.

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.