5 Superball Stocks

In my recurring Fool column, "Get Ready for the Bounce," we search for future winners in a pile of 52-week losers. But do we really need to sit around for a whole year, waiting for a fallen stock to bounce back?

Nope. Sometimes stocks fall hard, in far less time than a year. And like a superball dropped from the balcony, the harder they fall, the higher they bounce. Today, we'll look at a few equities that have suffered dramatic drops over the past week. With a little help from the 165,000-plus members of Motley Fool CAPS, we hope to find an opportunity or two for you:

Companies are selected by screening on finviz.com for abrupt 5% or greater price drops over the past week. 52-week high and recent price data provided by finviz.com. CAPS ratings from Motley Fool CAPS.

Good news, bad news, and no news
Ugh. Did you enjoy last week? I know I didn't -- and a whole lot of people invested in the hundreds of stocks that lost 5% or more of their value over the past week probably didn't enjoy the experience much, either.

As for why the stocks dropped, the reasons varied -- and sometimes, there seemed no reason at all. Take Suntech Power, for instance. No mystery there: The company reported a $175 million loss in last week's earnings report, bad enough to drive anyone's stock down. In contrast, the only thing we heard out of Intuitive Surgical last week was that it inked a small deal to license intellectual property from Cardica (Nasdaq: CRDC). Yet for some reason dropped for the week.

As for MannKind … well, it's still burning cash, and selling shares and raising debt to pay for it. (Surprise!) Worse, as fellow Fool Brian Orelli pointed out, part of the company's financing deal has it providing shares to Bank of America for the express purpose of helping other investors sell them short. Gee, do you think this might depress its stock a bit? (It did.) Back on the flip side, rival biotech Incyte had even less to report than did Intuitive Surgical last week, yet saw its stock slide nearly as far. Crazy times.

Of course, if you ask me, the craziest thing happening last week was the continuing crash that is Transocean. Questions over the apparent disappearance of much of the Gulf oil slick, and worries over an underwater oil plume notwithstanding, much of the news concerning BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster has been of the "good" variety lately. Regardless, Transocean's stock is still listing heavily. What are the chances they can right the ship in time to reward investors?

The bull case for Transocean
Pretty good, if you ask CAPS member uh60: 

The current price is way undervalued because of the connection with the gulf disaster, once the lawsuits roll over I believe Transocean will come out with little liability, and only minute penalties will face them compared to the multi-billion BP will be stuck with ... sorry BP you own the whole sad situation since you own all the possible profit.

wildbill40 agrees: "assuming the good news from the Gulf continues (i.e., that the oil spilled is deteriorating), this is a good value." And maybe even better than that. According to All-Star investor metoo105 in addition to "good value," Transocean offers investors a chance to "hedge against inflation. If inflation ticks up, oil prices should hold and that will also give rig operators pricing power."

Stick to your knitting
Now personally, I'm not sure inflation will tick up. But I'm happy to leave interest rate prognosticatin' to experts like Ben Bernanke. Whether it's inflation or deflation that awaits us, either way I think Transocean will do just fine.

Why? Because the price just looks right. Selling for 5.8 times trailing earnings and 6.3 times forward earnings, Transocean already appears to have a worst case scenario "baked in" to its market cap. Most analysts, however, expect the company to grow its earnings at an 8.2% annual clip over the next five years. Even better, Transocean generates free cash flow ahead of its reported earnings -- so you know the quality of these earnings is high.

Time to chime in
To me, all this adds up to an excellent argument for buying the stock, and especially so now that it seems the worst of the Deepwater Horizon troubles are past. But that's just my opinion. What we'd really like to know now is what you think about the stock? Is this a superball poised to bounce, or a value trap in disguise? Click over to Motley Fool CAPS now, and clue us in.