5-Star Stocks Poised to Pop: Netgear (NTGR)

5-Star Stocks Poised to Pop: Netgear

Based on the aggregated intelligence of 180,000-plus investors participating in Motley Fool CAPS, the Fool's free investing community, Wi-Fi router maker Netgear (Nasdaq: NTGR ) has earned a coveted five-star ranking.

With that in mind, let's take a closer look at Netgear's business and see what CAPS investors are saying about the stock right now.

Netgear facts

Headquarters (Founded)	Santa Clara, Calif. (1996)
Market Cap	$1.34 billion
Industry	Communications equipment
Trailing-12-Month Revenue	$1.13 billion
Management	Co-Founder/Chairman/CEO Patrick Lo Co-Founder/Chief Technology Officer Mark Merrill
Return on Equity (Average, Past 3 Years)	8%
Cash/Debt	$321 million / $0
Competitors	Cisco Systems Hewlett-Packard

Sources: S&P Capital IQ and Motley Fool CAPS.

On CAPS, 97% of the 2,349 members who have rated Netgear believe the stock will outperform the S&P 500 going forward.

Just last month, one of those Fools, eblasy, touched on the tasty tailwinds working in Netgear's favor: "If you look at all the restaurants starting to give free wi-fi, they'll be looking for a company to supply them and that company could very well be NetGear. They supply quality and easy set up wi-fi and router technology, so it's not really that hard to believe that they could be the next big thing."

What do you think about Netgear, or any other stock for that matter? If you want to retire rich, you need to put together the best portfolio you can. Owning exceptional stocks is a surefire way to secure your financial future, and on Motley Fool CAPS, thousands of investors are working every day to find them. CAPS is 100% free, so get started!

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Fool contributor Brian Pacampara owns no position in any of the companies mentioned. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended buying shares of Netgear and Cisco. The Motley Fool owns shares of and has created a bull call spread position on Cisco. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days.

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Comments from our Foolish Readers

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Report this Comment On January 09, 2012, at 2:48 PM, FoolSolo wrote:

Restaurants and other public WiFi hotspots are just a piece of the puzzle. Netgear is very nicely positioned for the SMB market with a lot of affordable, manageable solutions. The bigger wave is the proliferation of consumer WiFi enabled devices, such as TVs, DVD players, iPods, iPads, etc. This is driving WiFi into every household around the world. Hand-in-hand driving this are the streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc.
The use of WiFi is exploding worldwide, and along with WiFi people are also looking for storage management, which is another area where Netgear is getting traction with NAS and similar router-based storage.
All of this bodes quite well for Netgear, D-Link and a small number of others. I think Netgear is positioned best among competitors.