10 Stocks to Shake the Market

In music, they're called “one-hit wonders” -- singers who belt out tune after tune, but are never able to regain the magic of their big hit song. Think Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" or Brownsville Station's "Smokin' in the Boys Room" -- monster hits never to be repeated.

We have seen similar one-hit wonders in stocks, too, like Pets.com or drkoop.com. These are companies that burst onto the scene -- many during the tech-bubble heyday -- but never lived up to the promise they held.

Whole lotta shakin' going on
While nostalgia's fun, "10 Stocks to Shake the Market" isn't about finding stocks that can't repeat their success. Instead, it's about looking at those that have made big moves and are likely to continue doing so.

To that end, we're looking at 10 stocks that made some of the biggest upward moves over the past month. We'll then pair this info with the ratings issued by our Motley Fool CAPS community. Higher ratings suggest that members believe a stock will continue to move higher in the future and outperform the market.

In the 20 months since we first began tracking the collective intelligence at CAPS, the data shows that newly minted five-star stocks offer the best opportunities for investors, while the lowest-rated companies have fared the worst. Four-star stocks outperformed the market by seven percentage points, and five-star stocks -- those with top honors in CAPS -- did even better.

Stock	30-Day % Change	CAPS Rating (out of 5)
StemCells (Nasdaq: STEM)	193.49%	**
Cheniere Energy (AMEX: LNG)	125.00%	**
UAL (Nasdaq: UAUA)	121.59%	*
AirTran Holdings	88.27%	**
PetroHawk Energy (NYSE: HK)	87.66%	****
Northern Dynasty Minerals	73.89%	****
Geron (Nasdaq: GERN)	71.15%	***
Nektar Therapeutics (Nasdaq: NKTR)	67.70%	**
Southwestern Energy (NYSE: SWN)	67.56%	***
Archer Daniels Midland (NYSE: ADM)	52.56%	****

Not bad -- half of these stocks carry ratings of three stars or better. Let’s zero in on some that CAPS members think will continue to outperform the market.

Geron
The potential for stem-cell companies was unleashed with the election of Barack Obama, who has indicated that he supports federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. That fueled interest not only in Geron, but in StemCells and Celgene as well. CAPS member blary54 finds Geron to be a financially fit competitor in the space, a fact that should power it forward:

big stem cell player. I like this stock with Obama being president.

This company has no debt and I see the stock exploding in the next couple years.

StemCells
But top-rated CAPS All-Star mpapile says "not so fast," arguing that if you look past the headlines, you'll see that players like StemCells aren't going to be any better off, Obama or not:

Lets look at the facts here, this company makes no money, and is NOT going to be directly affected by the political change! If you know anything about research and stem cells the only restriction on stem cells was that embryonic stem cells were not allowed to be used in federally funded research. This did not mean that private companies were not allowed to use embryonic stem cells.

So here is a company that specializes in tissue derived stem cells supposedly, and has been around for 15 years and is not even profitable. If anything, there is going to be more public research using embryonic lines now which will not help StemCells. In fact, it means govt finances will be used to move ahead in university labs, not in their labs.

You can read all of mpapile's analysis of the situation on StemCells' CAPS page.

United Airlines
Shares of United Airlines have doubled in recent weeks as oil prices continue their slide, and the cost-cutting measures implemented earlier this year can only help matters more. Yet though capacity has been cut, traffic is down as well, and the credit crisis may yet envelop the industry. CAPS All-Star POSstocks acknowledges that the short term may not be favorable for an “underperform” pick, but argues that the innate unprofitability of United will show itself eventually:

I'm going to wait this one out. This company is losing $33 a share (Nov. 3, 2008). Just because oil is half price isn’t going to make this company profitable anytime soon if ever.

Shake, rattle, and roll
These stocks have been shaking the market this past month, and it pays to start your own research on them at Motley Fool CAPS. Read a company's financial reports, scrutinize key data and charts, and examine the comments your fellow investors have made -- all from a stock's CAPS page.