3 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 in the Motley Fool CAPS community also like a bargain, apparently. Below, you'll find three companies whose shares are selling at least 50% below their 52-week highs, but that still earn high 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
Maybe it wasn't such a good bet after all for GigaMedia to sell off that 60% stake in its online gambling software business. Its Asian online gaming business continues to take hits, with revenues falling 7% year over year and down 4% sequentially. It managed to hold onto the same number of active paying accounts as it had in the first quarter, but they were spending less, just $25.10 per user, an 11% sequential decline. No doubt they're instead spending their time and coin on NetEase.com's ever popular World of Warcraft, where analysts estimate average concurrent users grew 10% this quarter.

The competition for wholesale power generation sparked a jump in RRI Energy's stock, bringing it a little closer to getting under the bar for being half off. With Dynegy (NYSE: DYN) being taken private by Blackstone and Allis-Chalmers (NYSE: ALY) accepting a bid from SeaDrill (Nasdaq: SDRL) subsidiary Seawall, CAPS member Rucus99 says RRI's management was smart to accept Mirant's (NYSE: MIR) bid earlier this year.

A reserve player
Profitability no longer seems to be a concern for investors in RAIT Investment Trust, which has posted its third straight quarter of earnings, but Moody's still thinks caution is warranted as it expects commercial real estate delinquencies to rise by double digit rates over the next year. CRE prices fell 4% in June, the biggest decline since July 2009.

While 20% of RAIT's mortgages and loans are in the retail space, which suffered the biggest drop in value during the second quarter (down 11%), more than two-thirds of the investments it's made are in multi-family properties. The situation in that segment has been a lot more mixed.

According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, 30-day delinquency rates rose 1.4% in the second quarter, while rates of 60 days or more for properties insured by Fannie Mae rose by just 0.01% in the second quarter. 90-day plus delinquencies remained unchanged.

The improving situation at RAIT has attracted the attention of investors like CAPS member sjacobs26 who sees the low price as an opportune time to get in on the turnaround:

Returned to profits the past 3 quarters. Looking to reinstate dividend if they can keep this up over the next few quarters. Upside far outweighs downside, looking to make serious dinero on RAS.

Have half a mind
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