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 which 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
Wind power component maker A-Power Energy Generation Systems has been caught up in a vortex of calamity since last year, when not only did it report plummeting revenues, but also announced it wanted to sever a supply agreement with General Electric (NYSE: GE). Then it got slammed going into earnings in late March when it announced it was postponing its conference call to some unspecified later date.

Wind power is getting buffeted from all sides these days. American Superconductor (Nasdaq: AMSC) was knocked about when its biggest customer stopped accepting orders, saying it had to work through inventory on hand.

A-Power has signed some smaller deals and said it just signed a memorandum of understanding to build a $75 million, 25-megawatt power generation plant in China. But don't get too excited. MOU's are pretty much worthless until something concrete actually happens. A couple of years ago, solar shop First Solar signed an MOU that would supposedly build the world's biggest solar power plant, a 2000-megawatt facility in the Mongolian desert. There was a lot of fanfare surrounding the deal, and First Solar's stock soared, but not much else has happened, particularly since it had a 20-year timeline associated with it. As one analyst put it, MOU's are like "first dates," and those rarely lead to a wedding ring.

Yet with almost 98% of the 326 CAPS All-Stars rating A-Power to outperform the broad market averages, it says they believe there's a chance the winds of change will once again be blowing at its back. Let us know on the A-Power Energy Generation Systems CAPS page whether you think there's still an ill wind blowing in the sector.

Generating interest
It's been a long road down for chipmaker Anadigics, which ought to be growing with the expansion of the mobile computer market, but has instead been mired in office politics between the board of directors and management and a weak Asia market.

While the distraction of its CEO and a senior VP resigning from the company is difficult enough to deal with, the collapse of Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM), which is one of Anadigics big customers, isn't helping either. "Broken," "at risk," "unreasonable" expectations, and "skeptical" are all terms being used to describe RIM in the aftermath of its awful first-quarter earnings report. When that's a customer that comprises a quarter of your revenues, you've got to have some concerns about Anadigics, too.

However, CAPS member NorthStreet thinks that all the negative news has finally been priced into the stock making its current valuation attractive:

Quality RF chip maker with plenty of extra capacity to accommodate growth without extra capex/expense. Strong balance sheet, strong takeover candidate. Recent revenue weakness makes price attractive. Good value here.

The Fool's free portfolio tracker can aggregate all the news about Anadigcs and whether the stock will go mobile again.

A smaller form factor
Despite a difficult fourth quarter, gold miner Northgate Minerals (NYSE: NXG) is still favored by the Fool's leading precious metals expert Christopher Barker over other equally problematic miners, such as Kinross Gold and Jaguar Mining. He thinks the market's overlooking the growth catalyst in Northgate's Young-Davidson mine, even though the miner is belaboring under production costs of $738 an ounce.

Jaguar, for example, suffers from equally high costs of $727 an ounce on consolidated operations, (down from $762 the quarter before), yet some of its mines exhibit even higher costs, such as the Caete project it is ramping up in Brazil, which goes for $850 per ounce (it had a low of $550 an ounce at its Paciencia operations).

With gold prices soaring higher, it gives high-cost producers like Jaguar some breathing room to still be profitable until they get their costs under control, and CAPS All-Star jimmyshah1 thinks management is making moves to get its house in order:

Jaguar Spends 60% of its earnings on interest expense & with the new $90 million convertible bond offering, these expenses will be slashed into half as well as capitalizing company to take advantage of the rising gold prices.

I believe it is a well timed move by the management & will show some tremendous support for this stock in short term. For more information visit my blog & facebook page for detailed analysis of this company!

You can see if Jaguar Mining can claw its way back to form by adding it to your watchlist.

Have half a mind
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