The 52-week Lows Screen allows GuruFocus users to view Guru stocks that have hit 52-week lows.
Page overview
You can have an overview of the numbers of 52-week low stocks by industries, browse the 52-week low within different industries; and you can also find the stocks that are owned by Gurus or bought by company executives that have made into the list.
Background
As value investors we are bargain hunters. We try to find quality companies at discount prices. The list of stocks that hit 52-week low in prices is a great place to find investment ideas, especially if these stocks are already owned by value Gurus, or bought by the executives of the companies recently.
The idea of finding bargains from the stocks that are making new lows worked well for Gurus like Robert Rodriguez and Arnold van den Berg. In listing the key attributes of his contrarian investment style, Robert Rodriguez said he needs to have the stocks “on or close to being on the new low list.” Guru Arnold Van Den Berg (Trades, Portfolio) likes to buy stocks that have historical low price/sales ratio. These stocks are usually on the 52-week low list.
Activist investor Carl Icahn (Trades, Portfolio) once said: “… I buy companies that are not glamorous and usually out of favor. It is even better if the whole industry is out of favor.”
Out of Favor Industries
Stock prices come down for a reason. The key to investing in stocks that are making new lows is to make sure that the problems are temporary. Will the stock prices go even lower? No one knows. Legendary investor Marty Whitman once said: “Don’t try to buy at the bottoms.”
Buying good companies in out of favor industries can be very rewarding to patient long term investors. In order to identify the out-of-favor industries, we calculate the ratio of the numbers of stocks that are close to 52-week lows relative to the number of stocks that are close to 52-week highs within the same industry. A higher ratio indicates more out of favor for the industry. The current list shows that Banks, Personal & Household Goods, Retail are the most out of favor industries. Users can browse through the 52-week low list within any of these industries. Users can also select a threshold in these pages to display the stocks that are within different percentages of the 52-week lows.
52-Week Low Guru Stocks
52-week low list is a great place to find out-of-favor industries and undervalued stocks, especially if these stocks are already owned by value Gurus. Since most of our Gurus are value oriented, a Guru’s ownership with the stock that is making new lows certainly gives investors some confidence. We have started a weekly highlight of some of the 52-week low Guru stocks in our news section.
Users are able to set the threshold to check the stocks that are within a certain percentage of 52-week lows, and sort the list with factors such as Number of Guru Owners, Number of Guru Buys/Sells, Dividend Yield, Market Cap, etc. As examples, if we sort with market cap, we find large companies like Citigroup Inc. (C, market cap $238 billion), The Home Depot Inc. (HD, market cap $66 billion) in the list; we also find Guru-owned microcap companies like Coachmen Industries Inc. (COA, market cap $98 million) and Dearborn Bancorp Inc. (DEAR, market cap $104 million). If we sort by dividend yield, we found companies whose yields have been elevated by the declines in stock prices. Examples: CORUS Bankshares Inc. (CORS) yielding 7.6%, 50% off 52-week high and owned by 1 Guru; National City Corp. yielding 6.4%, 36% off 52-week high and owned by 2 Gurus. This list currently contains a lot of banks. Browsing through the list will certainly help you locate new ideas.
This feature is for Premium Members only. Premium Members can browse through this page here. If you are a Premium Member and have set up your Personalized List of Gurus., the number of Gurus shown is from your personalized list. Part of this list will be emailed to Premium Members in Premium Member Update Notifications. If you are not a Premium Member, we invited you for a 7-day Free Trial.
52-Week Low Insider Buys
These are the stocks that have been bought by company executives within different periods (you can select) and the prices are at 52-week lows. As pointed out by Peter Lynch, "Insiders might sell their shares for any number of reasons, but they buy them for only one: they think the price will rise." In general, there are a lot of small cap ideas on this page. Some of the stocks are not even on the radar screen of our Gurus. Researching these stocks will help you find under-valued small cap stocks that are overlooked by Wall Street. Users can select the time period for the insider buys that hits 52-week lows. You can also sort the list by Number of Unique Insider Buys, Market Cap, Dividend Yield, P/E ratio etc.
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