3 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 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 three companies whose shares are selling at least 50% below their 52-week highs, but which still earn high 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
Spain was an important market for many solar industry players because of the high level of subsidies the government gave to companies there, but the curtailing of feed-in tariffs here and elsewhere around the globe is going to hurt a lot of the players. The latest move by Spain to suspend 143 plants that couldn't prove they were operational before 2008 means the country will be supporting just 500 megawatts of PV plants instead of the 2,400 megawatts it did back in 2008.

For companies like Canadian Solar (Nasdaq: CSIQ) that still have a large exposure to the country, it may be a problem, but it shouldn't be anything more than a speed bump for ReneSola. Although revenues in the Iberian peninsula went from $20,000 to $66 million over the past two years, that represents just 5.5% of the solar shop's annual revenues. So even if it lost all of its business there, it wouldn't materially affect operations, and that's not going to happen.

Others like Yingli Green Energy (NYSE: YGE) and SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWRA) were also among those that began dramatically scaling back Spain's importance to operations when they began cutting tariffs in 2008, and now that country represents around just 5% of their sales, respectively.

Still CAPS member JackCaps believes the tenor of the industry has changed and the solar bubble has popped.

Let us know on the ReneSola CAPS page whether this solar shop can still shine brightly.

Generating interest
Similarly, the dry bulk shipping market is a shell of its former self, sent to Davey Jones' locker by a glut of ships on the market and the collapse of charter rates. Eagle Bulk Shipping got swamped by the demise of one of its primary customers Korea Line, which declared bankruptcy, leaving Eagle to founder as it had leased more than a quarter of all its vessels to the shipper.

But unless you're thinking Eagle is going to join Korea Line on the ocean's bottom, you have to look at its dramatically reduced stock price as something of a buying opportunity. It reported a $5.8 million loss in the first quarter, but that was mainly related to the customer bankruptcy. Absent that charge, Eagle actually posted a $0.01 per share profit and revenues were up a surprisingly solid 60% as gross time charter and freight revenues jumped and it booked 99% fleet utilization. Not bad for a shipper that's selling at just six times last year's earnings but is expected to grow profits more than 62% next year.

While DryShips (Nasdaq: DRYS) and Paragon Shipping are both similarly valued, the former is expecting only an 8% bump in earnings while the latter's are expected to fall 67%.

CAPS member Teacherman1 looks forward to a time when the Great Recession is something you tell your grandkids about.

Just can not resist at these prices. One day when the "Global Recession" is a faint memory, you will be glad you picked some up. Buying on dips. Great price for accumulation.

The Fool's free portfolio tracker can aggregate all the news about Eagle Bulk Shipping and whether the stock will sail again another day.

A smaller form factor
It hasn't been easy for BSD Medical to overcome the sketchy history of hyperthermia cancer treatment systems, let alone their expensive price tag, but it's hoping its new MicroThermX, a compact microwave generator system, changes all that. It is setting up a distribution system with outside contractors to get its device into the hands of those who will use it.

BSD says the global soft tissue ablation market is in excess of $2.3 billion, and though there are competing systems from Angiodynamics and Boston Scientific, BSD is looking to break out this treatment into the mainstream.

CAPS members don't think it will burn you, as 94% of those rating BSD believe it will outperform the broad market average. Tell us in the comments section below or on the BSD Medical CAPS page whether you think the stock is going to heat up.

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