5 Superball Stocks

In my recurring Fool column, "Get Ready for the Bounce," we search for future winners in a pile of 52-week losers. But do we really need to sit around for a whole year, waiting for a fallen stock to bounce back?

Nope. Sometimes stocks fall hard, in far less time than a year. And like a superball dropped from the balcony, the harder they fall, the higher they bounce. Today, we'll look at a few equities that've suffered dramatic drops over the past week. With a little help from the 170,000 members of Motley Fool CAPS, we hope to find an opportunity or two for you:

Companies are selected by screening on finviz.com for abrupt 5% or greater price drops over the past week. 52-week high and recent price data provided by finviz.com. CAPS ratings from Motley Fool CAPS.

Five super falls -- one superball
There's no two ways about it. If you owned any of the five stocks named above last week, you're significantly poorer for it today. So what went wrong?

In some cases, the answer's obvious. Take the two Irish bankers on today's list for example: Allied Irish was essentially nationalized last month, and last week its stock was delisted from the Irish stock exchange. Investors are not waiting for the other shoe to drop, and crush Bank of Ireland's stock as well -- they're rushing for the exits today.

Closer to home, bad news of a different sort struck our stocks. Celgene reported a 16% drop in fourth-quarter profits, sparking a reduction in target price by one analyst, and a flat-out downgrade by another. Abbott Labs did better on the earnings front, but was rewarded with a "sell" rating from Citi for its efforts. Likewise, Raytheon reported a 9% dip in profits for the fiscal fourth quarter. Apparently, this was enough to "beat estimates," but not enough to appease the Street -- which subtracted another 3% from Raytheon's market cap, adding to losses earlier in the week.

And yet while Wall Street may be jittery, most investors actually remain optimistic about these companies. Each and every one of them receives above-average four- and five-star ratings on CAPS, and the one that Fools love best is Abbott Labs. Why might that be?

The bull case for Abbott Laboratories
According to CAPS member dajmipivo, Abbott is "On sale today," a fact that tzapa believes was exacerbated by the "miss" on earnings at fellow pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) last week. And cec76 argues that "the company is doing everything they need to do in order to remain competitive with its peers. This aggressive business plan will pay off. Great value at this price, not to mention the dividend attached to it."

There's merit to that argument. As ArfytheSeal argued just before earnings were released, "the company is very cheap based on its prospects, trading at just over 10x forward earnings ... There is a 3.7% dividend yield."

Post-earnings, the story has gotten even better. Thanks in part to strong profits performance, in part to investors' ignoring that performance, you can now own Abbott Labs for less than nine times forward earnings, which seems a fair price to pay for the 9% long-term earnings growth that Wall Street expects to see at Abbott. And of course, there's that 3.7% divvy to sweeten the deal ...

Now, consider how much more expensive other stocks in the drugs space cost. The aforementioned Johnson & Johnson sports a higher P/E, but a growth rate about 40% slower than Abbott's, while Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) costs even more, yet is growing even less. To me, it seems clear that Abbott offers a relative bargain in pharmaceuticals at the very least. The question is whether it's enough of a bargain to be worth buying.

And that's not a rhetorical question. Is Abbott cheap enough to buy at today's discounted price? Click over to Motley Fool CAPS now, and tell us what you think.