5 Stocks Bucking the Downtrend

Even on the market's worst days, buyout news and other short-term forces can send individual stocks up by 10%, 25%, even 50%.        

For example, shares of Diedrich Coffee jumped nearly 30% one day last week as the bidding war between Peet's Coffee & Tea and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters to acquire the company heated up.

But beyond less-predictable events like that one are stocks with fundamentally compelling reasons for recent momentum. The trick is to find those stocks. That's where Motley Fool CAPS comes in.

The story behind the story
CAPS is no crowd of lemmings. Its best-performing members' opinions do more to shape each company's rating than the picks of their poorer-performing peers. Let's use the collective wisdom of more than 145,000 CAPS members to filter out the noise and find companies offering strong momentum.

We'll use CAPS' handy stock screening tool to quickly zero in on companies with a stock price increase of at least 25% in the past four weeks, a market cap of greater than $100 million, and a beta of less than 3. Below is a sample of stocks that our screen returned. If you'd like, run this screen yourself -- just keep in mind that results may change as the market does.

Source: Motley Fool CAPS. Price return from Oct. 30 through Nov. 27.

Silver Wheaton
Silver Wheaton recently reported a solid third-quarter performance, reporting record net earnings and operating cash flows, among other record-setting achievements. It completed its Barrick Gold (NYSE:ABX) silver stream acquisition during the quarter and now has an interest in two potentially very lucrative silver producing mines -- the Pascua Lama with Barrick and the Penasquito with Goldcorp (NYSE:GG). The company's potential prompted RBC Capital Markets to upgrade its shares in anticipation of large production increases and above-average growth relative to peers. I've already joined many bullish CAPS members on giving the thumbs up to Silver Wheaton because the company holds a strong position to take advantage of more opportunities. In all, 96% of the 1,676 members rating Silver Wheaton expect it to beat the market.

Sprint Nextel
After Sprint Nextel posted a wider third-quarter loss and Standard & Poor's warned that it may cut its credit rating, investors in the still-struggling company recently got a little relief after the stock received an analyst upgrade. A Credit Suisse analyst believes that Sprint will begin to do better at keeping customers and expects strength in Sprint's prepaid services will help offset the number of fleeing post-paid subscribers. Investors were also heartened when Sprint said that it paid down $1 billion on its revolving credit facility, using some of its cash to wipe out the credit facility's balance.

But the company still has a large amount of debt, and many investors expect a continuing challenging environment for Sprint. It continued to lose subscribers in the third quarter, while larger competitors like AT&T (NYSE:T) and Verizon (NYSE:VZ) added to their numbers, and it has a lot riding on the success of Clearwire, which it recently said it would funnel more money into. In CAPS, 77% of the 1,800 members rating Sprint Nextel expect it to outperform the broader market.

And you?
What's your story? Whether you buy the tale of a stock that's soaring or souring, your own research is more important than collective opinions. But these collective opinions can make your due diligence a whole lot easier.

Add your take on these or any of the 5,300 stocks that our 145,000-plus members have covered in Motley Fool CAPS. It's totally free to be a part of the community, and the payback is more than worth it.