Get Ready for the Bounce?

"Don't catch a falling knife." Thus commandeth the old saw (to mix a cutlery metaphor).

But if people weren't tempted to catch cutlery in the first place, there'd be no need for this little bit of investing wisdom, would there? The idea of buying a former highflier at a discount price certainly has its attractions. The trick, of course, is to increase the odds that when you make your grab, you're catching haft, not blade. That's where we come in.

In The Motley Fool's continuing effort to keep your investing dollars safe, today we once again assume our position beneath Mr. Market's silverware drawer. As the knives plummet, we'll measure who's fallen farthest. Then we'll head over to Motley Fool CAPS and ask which of these stocks Foolish investors think are ready to rebound to new highs -- if any.

With that said, let's meet today's list of contenders, drawn from the latest "52-week lows" list at MSN Money:

Knives and knaves
As you can see, our fellow investors over on CAPS aren't terribly enamored of this lot. The vast majority of the stocks on MSN's "shot" list don't even have CAPS ratings, because they're too small and too illiquid to merit inclusion in our service. Of the few that did make the initial cut, not a single one scores even an average, three-star rating.

Ready to bounce?
Ordinarily, I use this space to highlight the highest-rated stock on the list. I then dig into our CAPS players' comments to see what our community intelligence has figured that Wall Street might have missed. No such luck today, with CAPS giving a great big thumbs down to each of the stocks on our list. Instead, let's look at one of the more intriguing -- if unloved -- stocks here: Enterra Energy Trust, a Canadian oil producer. Here's what investors have to say about it:

• motleyanimal (who has a respectable 71.40 rating on CAPS) thinks that Enterra's "recent distribution cut has caused an irrational selling and decline in price. It should recover some when things calm down."
• And why was the stock popular in the first place, before all this "irrational selling"? CAPS newcomer 12bagger explains: "At $7.81, it's hard not to see this as undervalued price-wise, considering the yield is now over 18%."
• But is that all there is to the story? Hardly. In fact, one reason this stock is so low-rated is because all-star players have made compelling cases against it. berko87 points out that the company has "loads of debt" and that its dividend "will have to drop to support the 60%-70% payout the company uses." Long story short, berko87 predicted the "dividend dropping to $0.06/month by june from the current $0.12 (which has dropped from $0.18), see the price at $6 by June, which gives a dividend ratio of 14% (in line with past ratios for the stock)." Good call, berko87. The dividend did indeed drop to $0.06 -- in February.

And yet, at $0.06 per month, Enterra will still be paying out roughly a 10% dividend yield on its current market cap. Is that too little to attract income investors? Let your voice be heard -- on this or any of the other companies listed above. Go to Motley Fool CAPS now and tell us what you think.

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Fool contributor Rich Smith does not own shares of any company named above. You can find him on CAPS, publicly pontificating under the handle TMFDitty, where he's currently ranked 30 out of more than 20,000 raters. The Fool has a disclosure policy.