5 Top Stocks at Half Price

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 bemoan 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 who populate 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 five-star honors from our investor-intelligence database. Consider it a BOGO sale on stocks.

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
Wall Street is finally catching up to the analysis CAPS members have offered on Trico Marine Services, a provider of marine support vessels for the oil and gas industry. It only took a 47% revenue jump in Trico's earnings report for professional analysts to see what the investor intelligence community has noticed for some time. Welcome to the party, fellas!

While exploration and production companies were cutting capital expenditures and canceling projects earlier this year as pricing for oil and natural gas hit a nadir, the recovery in the sector has given encouragement to those servicing them. Trico's shares have doubled in the past six months, and Omni Energy Services (NASDAQ:OMNI) is up 150% in that same period. CAPS members have been steadily boosting their opinion of Trico since last year, finally giving it the highest five-star rating in April.

Debt remains a concern, of course, as ryanvt0173 pointed out last year. But even, then he felt the market was still undervaluing the energy-services stock:

They just bought deep ocean and will be a major player in deep water well construction services. As such they deserve a higher multiple. Debt is an issue, they used a convertible to finance the acquisition which will not help the stock in the short term, but long term this company is positioned in a sweet spot.

Oil and gas exploration got another thrill when McMoRan Exploration reported success at its Blueberry Hill deep gas well off the coast of Louisiana last month. McMoRan sidetracked a previously bored well, and it expects Blueberry Hill to become another major discovery with "significant reserve potential." McMoran jointly owns the well with Plains Exploration & Production (NYSE:PXP). The company indicated that Blueberry Hill is a deeper point in the formation than its Mound Point field, which produced more than 2.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas equivalents at a depth about half of what McMoRan is planning for this well.

With natural gas prices falling 48% this year to sit at record lows, consumers ought to benefit this winter from low energy bills. Yet the divergence from natural gas's historical patterns in relation to oil has CAPS member aikiboy2k believing that as global demand heats up, gas prices will revert to the mean: "Five consecutive quarters of dramatic revenue increases until bottom fell out in 3Q '08 due to increased supply/reduced demand and lower oil prices. Set to rebound as energy prices creep up and demand increases with the recovering global economy."

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.