Low-priced stocks can present immense opportunities if purchased at the right time. Several factors affect stock prices, including broader market disruption, negative news, bad quarters, or temporary product failures. Even slight delays in product launches can knock down stock prices, as can technical trading run amok, presenting a great opportunity for buyers who know when to pounce on declines.
Low-priced stocks do not necessarily equate to low-market cap companies and greater risk, as the stock price is a combination of number of shares in circulation and market cap. Nonetheless, low-priced stocks may also have an undeserved reputation among inexperienced investors as being too volatile to invest in.
In this article we will share 5 of the best under-$5 stocks which you can buy now. These stocks have huge potential for growth in the future, which is why they’re extremely popular among the collection of top hedge funds in our database, which includes many of the 140 Biggest and Most Famous Activist Hedge Funds in the world. Read on to find out what stocks made the list.
At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 39.7% gains over the past 12 months and outperformed the 24.1% gain enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs. Our enhanced small-cap hedge fund strategy returned more than 45% over the last 12 months and outperformed SPY by more than 30 percentage points over the last 4.5 years (see details here).
1. Avon Products, Inc. (NYSE:AVP)
2. Office Depot Inc (NASDAQ:ODP)
Office Depot Inc (NASDAQ:ODP) recently posted upbeat results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2016, though the market has been rather tepid towards the stock this year. The office supplies retail company posted sales of $2.73 billion for the fourth quarter, versus the FactSet consensus of $2.70 billion, while EPS of $0.11 was also above the Street’s forecast of $0.10. Full-year sales of $11 billion were down by 6% from 2015. Office Depot’s new CEO Gerry Smith said in a statement that he has developed a three-year ‘strategic plan’ for profitability improvement and shareholder returns. A total of 31 hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long Office Depot Inc (NASDAQ:ODP) as of the end of the fourth quarter, with their positions valued at over $277 million.
3. SUPERVALU INC. (NYSE:SVU)