Beat This Stock!

Investing presents many roads that can lead to profits. We don't need to find "the best" single stock year after year to secure our financial future -- but we do need to find really good stocks and do it consistently. The collective intelligence of our 80,000-plus Motley Fool CAPS investors makes that task easier than ever.

For every high-rated stock on CAPS -- such as five-star health insurer UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), which has successfully overcome scandal and adversity -- there's an even better stock above it in the rankings. You'll find the "Beat This Stock!" button in the top right corner of each stock's CAPS page. Click that button long enough, and you'll climb the CAPS ladder to the service's No. 1-ranked stock. Along the way, you'll gain a handful of stock ideas that might help you beat the market by an even wider margin than you would with your favorite firm.

So what ranks better than UnitedHealth? Below are five stocks that, in the opinion of CAPS' investors, ranked higher than the HMO. CAPS is a dynamic service, and while these were the companies generated this morning, the list may be different for you now:

Sources: Yahoo! Finance; Motley Fool CAPS. N/A = not available.

This is obviously not a list of stocks to buy; instead, it should be a springboard for your own due diligence. Still, let's examine why CAPS investors think these companies' returns will beat UnitedHealth as well as the market.

A flash in the pan?
NAND flash memory is used in many consumer electronic devices today -- MP3 players, digital cameras, USB drives, and mobile phones, to name a few.

Considering the growth opportunities in this market, it's surprising to see that Silicon Motion, which makes controllers for NAND flash memory, has such a low valuation. Sure, the chip market is finicky, let alone cyclical, but perhaps the biggest cause of a depressed valuation -- its forward multiple is below 8 -- is the plethora of rivals a company such as Silicon Motion faces: Samsung Electronics, Advanced Micro Devices, Toshiba, and others.

Despite this, there has been such a huge demand for flash memory that Toshiba, for example, reported near the end of last year that it had run out of such memory and had to turn business away. The company was sold out until December, it said. That pent-up demand has some CAPS All-Stars such as floridabuilder, with a 99.94 player rating, seeing more growth for Silicon Motion ahead. In his pitch, he quoted part of this article:

[T]here are 5 support points going back to Feb of this year and it is at a 25% discount from its Oct high. ... [Silicon Motion] missed earnings by 2 cents (30 vs. 32), but trades at a PEG of .50. ... that is a pretty low PEG unless of course your a mortgage company, retailer or builder. ... the motley fool has had 2 wires recently after the miss and neither are negative, if anything there is a positive spin that better times are ahead. ... here is an [excerpt:]

"Management called this quarter 'a difficult period' for the company and the memory controller industry as a whole. NAND flash memory shortages at the start of the quarter have loosened a bit now, but had a real effect on sales and profits over the past three months."

Just beat it!
Is CAPS correct? These companies might rate higher than UnitedHealth, but will they beat its performance going forward? Head to Motley Fool CAPS and share your opinion on your favorite stock to beat.