The 10 Hottest Stocks Right Now

Even in the last year, deep in the season of our financial discontent, there were winners. I set out to find them.

I looked for the top performer in each sector, with only these restrictions: The company had to have a market cap of at least $1 billion a year ago and sell on a major U.S. stock exchange.

They aren't who you likely expected. Although they have all held up well, Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT), Marvel (NYSE:MVL), and McDonald's (NYSE:MCD) didn't make the list.

Without further ado:

Sources: Capital IQ (a division of Standard and Poor's) and Yahoo! Finance as of 4/13/2009.

Let's be clear: The list certainly can't compete with comparable lists from prior years -- only one stock (Myriad Genetics) doubled in value. Of course, when the S&P 500 drops by 36%, anything above zero is a windfall. And surprisingly, there was at least one positive gainer in each sector (even in financials).

The obvious question before us is, "Will last year's winners be this year's winners?" Before we try to draw any conclusions, let's see what happened to 2007's winners:

Sources: Capital IQ (a division of Standard and Poor's) and Yahoo! Finance.

All right, that's a lot of data. So what can we learn from it?

The lessons
Two years of data isn't enough evidence to draw definitive conclusions, but we can certainly gain some insight as we figure out what to do with our portfolios for the year ahead.

With that caveat, I see two lessons:

1. There are winners in just about any market. Even in a year as brutal as this past one, we saw winners in every sector. Of course, finding those winners is the tricky part. Of the 1,821 companies larger than $1 billion, just 128 posted a gain over the last 12 months.

2. We can't just blindly follow the winners. Although 2007's winners averaged a 242% gain in 2007, they fell significantly harder than the average stock in 2008. So the idea of simply buying the trailing-12-month winners probably isn't our best bet. As we saw with 2008, a lot changes in a year.

Are winners worth it?
Seeing the precipitous drop in 2007's top-performing stocks, another obvious question remains: Is it worth it to hold onto winners?

To quantify the best-case scenario, let's look at Microsoft -- the granddaddy of all growth stories. Starting with its March 1986 IPO and ending with 1999, just before the tech bubble crash, its calendar-year returns were:

• 75%
• 129%
• (3%)
• 65%
• 71%
• 123%
• 15%
• (5%)
• 52%
• 43%
• 88%
• 56%
• 115%
• 68%

That's a more than 60,000% return in less than a decade and a half. Even with the turbulence of the tech crash and the recent credit crunch, Microsoft has returned over 20,000% from its IPO.

Yet during its amazing run, Microsoft never achieved a one-year return as high as eight of 2007's 10 sector leaders. Instead, we see in Microsoft the beauty of multiple years of compounding returns. But we have to ask ourselves whether a company generating a great one-year return is the next Microsoft, or one of the thousands of companies that will fall well short.

David Gardner, the Fool's co-founder and advisor of our Motley Fool Rule Breakers newsletter, believes it's worth holding onto your winning stocks -- even during market turbulence. His philosophy is to find great companies and hold on for the long term, rather than trying to time his entries and exits. Sure, selling Microsoft right before the tech bubble burst would have been a great move. But on the flip side, an investor locking in triple-digit Microsoft gains after a dip in 1988 would have forgone a fortune.

Often, the stocks David recommends are highfliers -- the type of stocks that make lists like the ones above. As we've seen, buying hot stocks (or any stocks, for that matter) can be risky. Investor sentiment (and the resulting price of a hot stock) skyrockets when times are good and plummets when times are bad.

Fortunately, when investor sentiment turns (as it has over the last year or so), long-term buy-and-hold investors can get tomorrow's hot stocks at a discount. In fact, right now David likes two of 2007's winners. If you're curious, you can see all the stocks he believes will flourish by clicking here for a 30-day free trial to Rule Breakers. There's no obligation to subscribe.

This article was first published Jan. 13, 2009 as "The 10 Hottest Stocks of 2008." It has been updated.

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Anand Chokkavelu owns shares of Intuitive Surgical, Marvel, McDonald's, and Microsoft. Microsoft and Wal-Mart are Motley Fool Inside Value picks. Intuitive Surgical, Baidu.com, and Shanda are Rule Breakers selections. Priceline.com and Marvel are Stock Advisor picks. The Fool has a disclosure policy.