5 Top Stocks at Half Price

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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 cry about 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 five stocks whose shares are selling at least 50% below their 52-week highs, but which still earn top honors from our investor-intelligence database. Consider it a buy one, get one free sale on stocks.

Stock	CAPS Rating	% Off 52-Week High
Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE)	*****	56%
Chesapeake Energy (NYSE: CHK)	*****	77%
Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE: FCX)	*****	79%
Golden Star Resources (NYSE: GSS)	*****	58%
Nexen (NYSE: NXY)	*****	69%

Source: Motley Fool CAPS, as of Feb. 17.

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
One billion served. No, we're not talking about some burger-flipping joint, but rather Adobe Systems, the maker of the ubiquitous Web-based media player Flash. According to the market analysts at Strategy Analytics, 1 billion is the number of cell phones that, by March, will have shipped containing some version of Adobe's Flash Lite, the not-so-full-featured edition of its flagship product.

While that alone represents an incredible installed base, it doesn't even begin to touch on computers and the new technologies with which the tech giant is striking back, like set-top boxes and netbooks. More importantly, it doesn't include the full import of Adobe's plans to introduce its full Flash on smartphones next year, a version that will work on handsets running Google's Android, Windows Mobile, Nokia's S60 on Symbian, and Palm's new WebOS.

It's true that the relationship between Adobe and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has been in a state of flux, and people are questioning whether Flash Lite will be compatible with the iPhone. If the two can't work out an amicable resolution, it's undoubtedly going to hurt the Flash maker. Yet smartphones will continue to be a technological sweet spot for the immediate future. Sound system specialist Dolby Labs (NYSE: DLB), for example, is also pursuing this market. Its management figures that in its phone segment, where half the phones sold are multimedia phones, revenues will grow about 30% on an annual basis.

Although Adobe wants and needs to have Apple in the fold, because even computer maker Acer is entering the crowded smartphone market, there will be plenty of opportunities to expand. And just in case things can't be ironed out, Adobe is signing onto an open-source initiative to enable a consistent experience for Web-browsing and stand-alone applications. It could be a bit of high-stakes poker to cause Apple to show its hand and come back to the table.

CAPS member ametts1 rightly notes that Adobe is more than just about Flash or the mobile phone market; it extends its reach.

[Adobe] has been trading at multi-year lows, yet earnings have been solid and (usually) increasing. By controlling ubiquitous technologies like PDF and Flash, emerging new ones like Flex and Air, and a wide range of well-regarded applications like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Illustrator, Adobe stands to benefit from any form of technology growth -- whether on Mac or Windows, Desktop, Internet, or Mobile. Expect technology stocks to lead us out of the market doldrums, and [Adobe] should be right there with the best of them when it happens.

If we look at Adobe's enterprise value-to-EBITDA ratio of just 6.8, along with the more common P/E ratio, which is 12.8, we see that this is perhaps not the cheapest stock on the block, but its valuations certainly make it attractive. And then there's all that potential for growth.

Have half a mind
It pays to start your own research on these stocks on 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.

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