The vast majority of financial news coverage focuses on who’s about to go through the roof: which stock is going to pop, skyrocket, or whatever euphemism for “go up” you want to use. A far less substantial amount of Wall Street journalism is devoted to that less glamorous of subjects, the losers. That is, the stocks that analysts think are going to go down. Way down.
Of course, with the advent of short selling there’s money to be made in predicting failure. Investors like Jim Chanos have made the entire careers off of betting that a company will fall in value. But still, outside of the occasional Muddy Waters report there’s very little attention gets paid to the so-called dogs.
We decided it would be interesting to take a look at some of them. Analysts very rarely assign stocks a rating less than “hold” or “neutral.” Less so a “sell,” even less so a “strong sell,” or the worst rating an analyst can give.
And then even less do analysts, as a consensus, give a stock the worst rating possible. But we thought there’d be stocks out there, stocks with some real value, that analysts as a whole absolutely loathed. So we went looking for plays with at least a $300 million market cap that analysts, on average, gave the worts rating possible to.
We found five stocks that fit the criteria of being both sizable and absolutely hated. Those five stocks are:
1) Aluminum Corporation of China Limited (ACH)
Market Cap: $4.68 billion
Price: $8.65
P/E/ Ratio: N/A
2) Konami Cor. (KNM)
Market Cap: $3.18 billion
Price: $22.95
P/E/ Ratio: 29.05
3) Terra Nitrogen Company L.P. (TNH)
Market Cap: $2.99 billion
Price: $161.48
P/E/ Ratio: 9.70
4) Tootsie Roll Industries (TR)
Market Cap: $1.91 billion
Price: $32.06
P/E/ Ratio: 34.11
5) Yanzhou Coal Mining Co. Ltd. (YZC)
Market Cap: $3.98 billion
Price: $8.09
P/E/ Rato: N/A
