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've suffered dramatic drops over the past week. With a little help from the 165,000 members of Motley Fool CAPS, we hope to find an opportunity or two for you:

Companies are selected by screening for 10% or greater price drops over the past week. 52-week high, recent price data, and CAPS ratings from Motley Fool CAPS.

Five super falls -- one superball
Another Monday, another down week for investors. As trading revved back up this morning, the S&P 500 was coming off a discouraging 3.6% loss for the past five trading days -- and many stocks fared far worse. Up above, you see five such hapless equities, each of which shed 10% or more of its value over the past week.

What went wrong? In most of the cases, we can track the losses back to two events. First, reports of cracks being discovered on Boeing 767 jets run by American Airlines left regulators investigating and investors worrying. Boeing's considering a recommendation that everyone who flies the jets should watch for signs of stress more often. In addition to American, that could mean extra costs and revenue-less downtime for Delta, UAL, Continental, and US Airways, as airplanes get sent back to the shop for repairs.

Then, adding price wars to injury, industry analysts cited Southwest Airlines' introduction of a fall airfare sale two weeks earlier than usual as evidence of weak demand among flyers. There's nothing like weak consumer demand, coupled with fears of an accelerated price war among airlines, to send stock prices tumbling.

But if you think that's bad news, did you hear what happened to News Corp. last week?

The bull case for News Corp
Neither did I. Not one news item explains the 10% decline that News Corp. shares suffered last week. To the contrary, a Standard &Poor's report issued last week revealed that advance sales of advertising time for the fall TV season were "stronger than expected in terms of [price] increases, volume, and the breadth of advertiser participation."

I'm not alone in thinking that this should be good news for News Corp. CAPS member xaresomai says News Corp. is dominating cable television, and poised to profit as it moves to make news-consumers pay for content.

On the newsprint front, aaw26 calls News Corp. "the largest. They will replace NY Times or buy and own. They cover more of the media industry than any other."

Indeed, as far back as 2007, CAPS member rjpaiz called News Corp. "the best-diversified player among the large-cap US companies in its segment ... [and it enjoys] high expected growth."

Just how high, exactly?
Wall Street's consensus estimates up on Wall Street call for the company to produce earnings growth in excess of 13.4% per year over the next five years -- a pace faster than you'll find at any of its major rivals, Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), Viacom, or Disney (NYSE: DIS). Don't even ask about the newsprint rivals, most of which are struggling to achieve even single-digit growth.

Sure, 13%-ish growth may not sound like enough to support News Corp.'s 22.4 P/E (as of last night). But dig a little deeper, and you may be surprised at how cheap this stock really has become. Free cash flow for the past 12 months came to more than $3.2 billion, which has the stock trading for close to 11 times free cash flow. Toss its net debt into the equation to calculate enterprise value, and it still trades for less than a 13-times multiple -- which looks decently cheap for the growth rate to my Foolish eye.

Time to chime in
Granted, saying that News Corp. has its detractors is a considerable understatement. But then again, it's unlikely the stock would ever have gotten this cheap if everybody loved it.

Is the stock cheap enough for you, Fool?