Are you really a growth investor?

It's worth asking. Fast-moving tech stocks have taken a beating recently, leading to a slew of bargains for those with the guts to buy.

No surprises there. Market panics occur daily. Just ask investors who hold shares of Chinese biotech 3SBio, which on Thursday fell more than 6% on no news whatsoever.

That's why all-star investors bet on growth over the very long term. They know that:

  1. Businesses that make investors billions always begin as growth stocks.
  2. The best of them feature massive and identifiable competitive advantages.
  3. Growth as a strategy has the capacity to deliver 20% or greater annual returns for decades at a time. 

How we do it
Of course, not all growth stocks will do. Our weekly hunt is for the next great multibagger. But unlike David Gardner and his team at Motley Fool Rule Breakers, who scour everything from financial statements to trade magazines to clinical reports in their research, we're going to rely on our Motley Fool CAPS investor-intelligence database.

Specifically, we're looking for stocks that have earned a five-star rating in CAPS and which are expected to grow their earnings by at least 20% annually over the next five years. Five-star stocks are those that the community, on the whole, believes will outperform the S&P 500.

Let's have the list
Now, with that preamble behind us, here are five more top growth stocks:

Company

No. of CAPS Ratings

Bullish CAPS Ratings

5-Year Growth Estimate

Navios Maritime (NYSE:NM)*

570

555

66.0%

Wonder Auto Tech. (NASDAQ:WATG)

156

155

30.0%

Hurco Companies (NASDAQ:HURC)

735

727

28.0%

Infosys Technologies (NASDAQ:INFY)

864

843

26.1%

NYSE Euronext (NYSE:NYX)

1,946

1,887

23.6%

Sources: Motley Fool CAPS, Yahoo! Finance.
*At the time of writing, this had a rating of five stars.

Bear in mind that this isn't a list of recommendations. Instead, I offer these stocks as candidates for further research.

At first, I was tempted to go with mega-exchange and Rule Breakers recommendation NYSE Euronext. Global trading volume for stocks has been on a northward climb for years, with no summit in sight.

Spicy returns on the subcontinent?
But I've been pondering emerging markets lately, and I've come to believe that some of the stalwarts of the Indian subcontinent have gone cheap: Infosys, for example, which for years has grown at the expense of U.S. consulting peers IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Accenture (NYSE:ACN).

Could that be changing? Investors seem to think so. Shares of Infosys are off 17% over the past 52 weeks. I think that's too much.

Here's why. Though both IBM and Accenture have made efforts to recruit and win work in India, Infosys remains extremely competitive:

Metrics

Infosys

IBM

Accenture

Return on capital

22.9%

15.5%

64.1%

Return on equity

37.8%

36.2%

72.7%

Gross margin

41.5%

42.1%

28.2%

Source: Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's.

And its stock is cheaper. Infosys trades for just less than 20 times next calendar year's earnings, resulting in a very reasonable 0.97 PEG ratio. Accenture is close with a PEG of 1.06, while IBM sports a higher PEG at 1.34.

I own shares of IBM, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the sell-off in Infosys has me intrigued. But that's just one Fool's opinion. What would you do? Would you buy Infosys at current prices? Let us know by signing up for CAPS today. It's 100% free to participate.

I'll be back later this week with five more top growth stocks. Fool on!