5 More Unloved Growth Stocks

Ah, the joys of skepticism.

We rebel investors at Motley Fool Rule Breakers believe the multibaggers in the making, while not often cheap by the numbers, are always misunderstood. The extraordinary skepticism they face makes them excellent value stocks.

Hitting just one of these home runs can make all the difference to your portfolio. Just ask David Gardner, who bought Amazon.com at a split-adjusted price of $3.24 a share in 1997. He's up more than 2,200% since.

Stocks like Amazon helped David to produce nine years of better-than-20% average annual returns in the real-money Rule Breaker portfolio, even while suffering stinging losses from Guitar Center and 3Dfx, among others.

Let the haters be your friends
David continues this home run investing tradition today at Rule Breakers. You can follow the moves of his rebel alliance with a free trial of the service. Or, if you prefer to pick your own stocks, there's Motley Fool CAPS, a 100% free stock-picking community whose 100,000-plus participating investors rate stocks on a scale of one to five stars. More than 5,600 rated companies are in the database right now.

How can this help you? Well, each week, using CAPS, we'll search for one- and two-star stocks that have at least 5% of their available shares sold short, but which are expected to grow their earnings by no less than 15% over each of the next five years.

Let's have the list
Here are today's unloved growth stocks:

Sources: Motley Fool CAPS; Yahoo! Finance; Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's; wsj.com.

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

Not a bad list, eh? Sirius may have the pre-wedding jitters, but doesn't need its partner-to-be, XM Satellite Radio (NASDAQ:XMSR), in order to produce prodigious growth. Profits, on the other hand, are a story for another time.

Be kind, MannKind
Not that a lack of profits should always stop you from buying growth. MannKind doesn't have any, and it's a pick of our Hidden Gems Pay Dirt service. Here's how Foolish colleague Bill Barker pitched the company last summer:

MannKind clearly falls within the realm of speculative investments, that doesn't mean it's not also a value play ... Bill Miller, the legendarily unconventional value investor and owner of the mutual fund world's longest streak of outperforming the market, recently highlighted MannKind as the company his fund owns that has the greatest potential. And he was buying shares at a significantly higher price than is available today. Other value-oriented investors, including the fine people at Morningstar, also see the stock trading well below its intrinsic value. [Emphasis added.]

There's room for a doubt when it comes to MannKind, for which you can thank peer Nektar Therapeutics (NASDAQ:NKTR). Its stock took a beating last month when Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) researchers observed an unexpected incidence of lung cancer in clinical trial patients of Exubera, an inhaled insulin treatment that is distantly reflective of MannKind's own Technosphere.

MannKind has since issued a statement that draws distinctions between Exubera and Technosphere, and MannKind founder Alfred Mann is said to have half his multibillion-dollar fortune tied to the success of the drug.

Interestingly, he's not alone. As CAPS investor zzlangerhans pointed out in this pitch from two weeks ago, deep-pocketed pharmas such as Pfizer, with its failed try at marketing Exubera, have a financial interest in bringing inhaled insulin to market.

But that's one Fool's take. I'm more interested in what you think. Would you buy MannKind at today's prices? Let us know by signing up for CAPS today. It's 100% free to participate.

See you back here next week for five more unloved growth stocks.