10 Stocks to Shake the Market

In music, they're called one-hit wonders -- singers who can never regain the magic of their one monster hit tune. Think Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" or Brownsville Station's "Smokin' in the Boys Room."

We've seen similar one-hit wonders in stocks, too, like Pets.com or drkoop.com. These companies burst on the scene -- many during the tech-bubble heyday -- but never lived up to the promise they initially seemed to hold.

Whole lotta shakin' going on
In investing, we want to avoid one-hit wonders at all costs, instead finding stocks whose initial big move was only the first of many to come.

Here, we'll look at 10 stocks that made some of the biggest upward moves over the past month. We'll then pair that list with the ratings issued by our Motley Fool CAPS community. The higher a company's rating, the more firmly CAPS members believe it'll continue to outperform the market.

With only two of these stocks carrying top ratings, let's see why the CAPS community thinks any of them might outperform the market.

A mighty temblor
Banks have a long way to go before they're properly valued, which is probably why many banks and investors have only given perfunctory support to the government's recently detailed rescue plan so far. The banks don't want to let any assets purchased by the plan go for a song, while the private investors vital to the plan's success might not want to pay the premiums the banks are seeking.

For that reason, stock investors think Bank of America and other financial institutions still need to write down billions more before we can call an end to our current fiscal misery. CAPS All-Star GenericMike says the recent rally in bank stocks can't withstand that reality:

This bear market rally of the past 2 weeks is going to fade. The Fed's moves don't change the fact that banks still have billions and billions of dollars of losses to write down. I wonder if people really understand what Citi and [Bank of America] meant when they said they were "profitable" recently.

Shake, rattle, and roll
It pays to start your own research on these market-shaking stocks 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.