Matthew Weinschenk’s Top 20 Stock Picks for the Rest of 2012

Published Thu, Sep 13th, 2012   Matthew Weinschenk, Senior Analyst

I’ve isolated four top trends all investors should keep a close eye on for the rest of the year.

Here’s a brief description of all four. I’ve also included a few of my favorite “Must Buy” stocks to play the trends.

GARP Stocks

It seems simple, but nothing beats a growing company with a stock trading at a good valuation. Here are my top five picks for “growth at a reasonable price” – or GARP.

Stock	Symbol	Recent Price
CAI International	CAP	$21.10
Tesoro Corp	TSO	$40.34
Swift Transportation	SWFT	$8.90
AFLAC Inc.	AFL	$48.54
Alaska Air Group	ALK	$34.72

 

Value in Tech Stocks

Investors often think that tech stocks are always risky. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

There’s a whole subset of established value stocks in the technology sector that I’ve written about before.

Here are my favorites:

Stock	Symbol	Recent Price
NVIDIA Corp.	NVDA	$13.59
CACI International	CACI	$55.02
Arris Group	ARRS	$13.93
EMC Corp.	EMC	$27.31
IXIA	XXIA	$15.38

 

Frontier Market Favorites

I noted recently that a round of QE3 will bring outsized returns to emerging market stocks. Pair that with the rampant growth these countries are experiencing, and you have the perfect time to invest in emerging and frontier market stocks.

Now, it’s not always easy to trade on these exchanges. But if you can manage it, here are five frontier stocks with market caps over $1 billion – and the fundamentals to back it up:

Stock	Country and Symbol	Recent Price
Vodacom Group	South Africa: VOD	10,830.00
MASAN Group	Vietnam: MSN	101.00
Gas Natural ESP	Columbia: GASNAT	120,000.00
Nestle Nigeria	Nigeria: NESTLE	577.50
National Shipping Co. of Saudi Arabia	Saudi Arabia: NSCSA	18.00

 (All priced in local currencies)

 

Small Caps With Heavy Insider Ownership

There’s no better vote of confidence for an investor than seeing insiders piling into a company’s stock. Am I right?

If you agree, here are five stocks that management’s betting on. Big time. And so should you…

Name	Symbol	Insider Ownership	Recent Price
Hollysys Automation	HOLI	33.97%	$9.20
QAD Inc.	QADB	60.75%	$12.62
Cervus Equipment	Toronto: CVL	33.24%	$20.20
Mediware Info. Systems	MEDW	37.11%	$21.86
MicroFinancial Inc.	MFI	37.09%	$8.93

 

Ahead of the tape,

Matthew Weinschenk