5 More Top Growth Stocks

Are you really a growth investor?

It's worth asking. Even though talk of a growth-stock rally has spread to the pages of The Wall Street Journal, investing in fast movers can be a stomach-churning experience.

This morning offers a good example. A new report showing that pending home sales hit a six-year low sent real estate stocks reeling. Yet unrelated tech shares also paid a price.

Witness wireless security specialist SourceFire (NASDAQ:FIRE), which was down more than 10% on no news whatsoever. Surprised? Don't be. Market panics occur daily. That's why all-star investors bet on growth over the very long term. They know that:

1. Businesses that make investors billions always begin as growth stocks.
2. The best of them feature massive and identifiable competitive advantages.
3. Growth as a strategy has the capacity to deliver 20% or greater annual returns for decades at a time. 

How we do it
Of course, not all growth stocks will do. Our weekly hunt is for the next great multibagger. But unlike David Gardner and his team at Motley Fool Rule Breakers, who scour everything from financial statements to trade magazines to clinical reports in their research, we're going to rely on our Motley Fool CAPS investor-intelligence database.

Specifically, we're looking for stocks that have earned a five-star rating in CAPS, and which are expected to grow their earnings by at least 20% annually over the next five years. Five-star stocks are those that the community, on the whole, believes will outperform the S&P 500.

Let's have the list
Now, with that preamble behind us, here are five more top growth stocks:

Bear in mind that this isn't a list of recommendations. Instead, I offer these stocks as candidates for further research.

Of these five, you'd think that Applix, a stock I recommended to our Rule Breakers subscribers and which I own, would be my top choice. It's not; Silicon Motion is.

Why? Applix today agreed to be acquired by business intelligence peer Cognos (NASDAQ:COGN) for an outrageously cheap $17.87 a share. Silicon Motion, on the other hand, remains a free-swinging small-cap stock with a cash-rich balance sheet and a mouthwatering 0.60 PEG ratio.

Plus, it's a good business. Here's how CAPS All-Star CaptBeer describes it:

... Products include controllers used in mobile storage media, such as flash memory cards and universal serial bus (USB) flash drives, and multimedia systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) used in digital media devices such as Moving Picture Experts Group Layer-3 Audio (MP3) players, personal computer (PC) cameras, PC notebooks and broadband multimedia phones.

Intrigued? Do your own due diligence, then check in with thousands of other investors at CAPS. And if you'd like, add your own commentary. You'll be helping your fellow Fools and testing your ideas at the same time. Click here to get started now; the service is 100% free.

See you back here next week for five more top growth stocks.