I have sad news to report today: Wally Schirra, one of America's original seven Mercury astronauts, died this week at age 84. As he once wrote:
We share a common dream to test the limits of man's imagination and daring. Those early pioneering flights of Mercury, the performances of Gemini, and the trips to the Moon established us once and for all as what I like to call a spacefaring nation. Like England, Spain, and Portugal crossing the seas in search of their nations' greatness, so we reached for the skies and ennobled our nation.
As a boy, I had a chance to hear Mr. Schirra speak. My faded memory allows for little more than the spine-tingling sensation that comes from hearing the stories of a man who had seen Earth from orbit. I couldn't imagine then that exploring the heavens, as Schirra did, would lead to innumerable benefits here on Earth. Computer technology, for example, would never have advanced as far and as fast as it has without space travel.
Running with the rebels
Freshly minted growth stocks can provide similar thrust for a portfolio. Just ask David Gardner, who captains the good pirate ship Rule Breakers. By discovering and investing in little-known and frequently misunderstood fast-movers, he produced nine years of 20% average annual returns. History told him that these were the best value stocks available.
That's why David and his team still seek to get in early on stocks that are reshaping, or creating, important industries. You can, too, with the help of our completely free-of-charge Motley Fool CAPS investor-intelligence database, which currently contains information on more than 4,400 stocks.
CAPS applies user input to rate stocks from one to five stars. Using CAPS, we'll once again search for stocks that haven't yet met the threshold for a star rating, that have a minimum $250 million market cap, and that are expected to grow their earnings by at least 15% annually over each of the next five years.
Let's have the list
Here are four growth stocks that have yet to be discovered.
|
Company |
No. of CAPS Ratings |
Bullish CAPS Ratings |
5-Year Growth Est. |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Enterprise Financial Services |
5 |
4 |
20% |
|
Dionex |
8 |
6 |
20% |
|
CastlePoint Holdings |
5 |
4 |
15% |
|
Schawk |
7 |
2 |
15% |
Bear in mind that this isn't a list of recommendations. Instead, I offer these stocks as candidates for further research. My favorite, however, is Bermuda-based insurer CastlePoint Holdings. Having gone public in March, it already sports an attractive 0.87 PEG ratio.
Intrigued? Do your own due diligence, then check in with thousands of other investors at CAPS. If you'd like, add your own commentary. You'll be helping your fellow Fools and testing your ideas at the same time. Click here to get started now; it's 100% free to participate.
See you back here next week for five more undiscovered growth stocks.
How great is growth? Four of the dozens of stocks in the market-beating Motley Fool Rule Breakers portfolio have more than doubled in two years. Care to find out who they are? Click here to get 30 days of free access to the service.
Fool contributor Tim Beyers, who is ranked 5,531 out of more than 28,300 in CAPS, is a sucker for growth stocks and a regular contributor to Rule Breakers. Tim didn't own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story at the time of publication. All of his portfolio holdings can be found at Tim's Fool profile. His thoughts on growth stocks, Foolishness, and investing in general may be found in his blog. The Motley Fool's disclosure policy is an investor's greatest discovery.
