5 of Last Week's Biggest Winners

What's better than momentum? Mo' momentum.

Let's take a closer look at five of this past week's biggest scorchers.

Company	Sep. 9	Weekly Gain	My Watchlist
Caliper Life Sciences (Nasdaq: CALP  )	$10.45	48%	Add
Temple-Inland (NYSE: TIN  )	$31.05	26%	Add
Ulta Salon (Nasdaq: ULTA  )	$68.45	24%	Add
Optimer Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: OPTR  )	$11.93	21%	Add
Talbots (NYSE: TLB  )	$2.83	18%	Add

Source: Barron's.

There was new life at Caliper after the maker of molecular imaging and detection technologies for life sciences research and diagnostics agreed to a buyout. PerkinElmer (NYSE: PKI  ) will be acquiring Caliper at $10.50 a share. The stock closed out the week just shy of that price, indicating that the market thinks the deal will go through and without a bidding war to drive that price tag higher.

Playing hard to get paid off for Temple-Inland. The maker of corrugated packaging and building products originally shot down International Paper's (NYSE: IP  ) buyout offer of $30.60 a share. The paper giant came back with a sweetened $32 offer that did the trick.

Ulta Salon colored out some of its gray hairs after posting better-than-expected quarterly results. The cosmetics retailer and beauty salon operator saw earnings skyrocket 73% to $0.38 a share, well ahead of the $0.32 a share analysts were expecting. Revenue climbed 23%, with roughly half of that coming from an impressive 11.3% spurt in comparable-store sales .Optimer announced that 11 abstracts reporting new research findings for its fidaxomicin tablets will be presented at a conference in Chicago this weekend. Optimer's drug was approved by the FDA for treatment of diarrhea associated with Clostridium difficile in adults back in May.

Finally, there's Talbots. The frumpy retailer may have posted a wider-than-expected loss on plunging sales, but the market cheered when the chain revealed that it would be hiring a new chief creative officer. Given Talbots' struggles lately, the reinvention process will be challenging but necessary.

It was a great week for these five stocks. Now let's see if they're up for an encore.

Which of these five stocks do you think will continue to move higher? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.