The Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffet has produced many nuggets of financial wisdom over his six decades long investing career, but if we had to pick out one favorite, we can do so without too much thought. When Buffet said that “if past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians,” he really hit the nail on the head. Investors tend to look at what a stock has done, rather than what it will do, based on the metrics right now.
Buffett was talking more about long-term history, but his advice works on a shorter time frame as well. For instance, investors tend to be wary of stocks that have shed a lot of value in the recent past. But this past performance does not mean the stock will continue plunging. And it can just as easily mean the stock, at current time, is undervalued and due for a jump.
Undervaluing like this is usually a result of panic selling. Panic selling most often in fickle sectors with a lot of movement. Technology is a prime example of this. So we went looking for tech stocks that can, as of the end of trading on Mar. 14, be an opportunity for plays that considered “oversold.”
METHODOLOGY
To find oversold tech stocks, we only required the stock comply with just two requirements. One, that the tech play is a “small-cap,” or worth between $300 million and $2 billion dollars. Two, that the company’s stock has an RSI (14) under 30.
RSI means Relative Strength Index, and is a Technical Analysis method of finding stocks that are either overbought or oversold. An RSI under 30 is unusually low, and indicates that the stock has broken into oversold territory – and is thus due to pop.
Of course, RSI is not a foolproof stat. But it can be valuable when used in conjunction with other investing strategies.
FINDINGS
We found eight small-cap tech plays that fit the bill.They are:
Blucora (BCOR)
Market Cap: $802.45 million
Price: $19.53
RSI: 24.91
PROS Holdings, Inc. (PRO)
Market Cap: $861.99 million
Price: $30.68
RSI: 26.42
Black Box Corporation (BBOX)
Market Cap: $359.11 million
Price: $22.77
RSI: 26.86
Demand Media (DMD)
Market Cap: $411.81 million
Price: $4.56
RSI: 27.29
Notes: Online content farm Demand Media has been hammered over the last year by changes to Google’s algorithm that were designed to weed out low-quality content.
PDFS Solutions (PDFS)
Market Cap: $576.97 million
Price: $19.04
RSI: 27.58
Notes: PDFS was also included in this week’s round-up of fundamentally undervalued tech plays.
Analogic Solutions (ALOG)
Market Cap: $983 million
Price: $79.00
RSI: 29.14
Pegasystems (PEGA)
Market Cap: $1.4 billion
Price: $36.98
RSI: 29.47
Cogen Communication Group (CCOI)
Market Cap: $1.61 billion
Price: $36.98
RSI: 29.48
