5 Stocks Bucking the Downtrend

For example, shares of Burlington Northern Santa Fe (NYSE: BNI) shot up 27% when it was announced that Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-B) would bag this elephant and buy the rest of the railroad's shares that it doesn't already own.                     

But beyond less-predictable events like that one are stocks with
fundamentally compelling reasons for recent momentum. The trick is to
find those stocks. That's where Motley Fool CAPS comes in.

The story behind the story

CAPS is no crowd of lemmings. Its best-performing members' opinions do more to shape each company's rating
than the picks of their poorer-performing peers. Let's use the
collective wisdom of more than 140,000 CAPS members to filter out the
noise and find companies offering strong momentum.

We'll use CAPS' handy stock screening tool
to quickly zero in on companies with a stock price increase of at least
20% in the past four weeks, a market cap of greater than $100 million,
and a beta of less than 3. Below is a sample of stocks that our screen returned. If you'd like, run this screen yourself -- just keep in mind that results may change as the market does.

Source: Motley Fool CAPS. Price return from Oct. 9 through Nov. 5.

Domo Arigato, Mr. iRobot

In addition to
its Roomba robot vacuum cleaners, robot maker iRobot makes various
military-grade robots for more dangerous applications and has strategic
alliances with companies such as Boeing and Taser (Nasdaq: TASR).
Its stock has been somewhat volatile in the past few months, but it
sprang to life recently after it beat Wall Street's third-quarter
expectations, despite lower year-over-year earnings and revenue.

Its domestic home robot sales saw weakness
in the quarter, but international sales shot up 55%. Its government and
industrial robots division received a strong amount of orders from the
U.S. government, and many CAPS members like the potential
for its unmanned PackBot robots, which are used to investigate
suspicious objects and identify roadside bombs. In CAPS, 88% of the
1,098 members rating iRobot expect it to outperform the market.

Movie madness

DVD rental company Netflix
has so far been able to quell the doubters and generate impressive
gains for its shareholders in recent years. The company has continued
to perform well, reporting strong third-quarter results
that beat expectations, with a 28% rise in subscribers over last year
that helped the company bring in 24% more revenue. It's looking for its
good fortune to continue, as it also raised its guidance.

Some investors see a big future ahead for the streaming of online movies as new competitors like Best Buy (NYSE: BBY)
try to get a piece of the market. Netflix hopes to counter the
competition by expanding the ways its streaming movies reach its
subscribers -- in addition to Microsoft's Xbox 360 and certain Blu-Ray players, Netflix is bringing streaming movies to Sony's (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation 3. Some CAPS members are concerned that the recent run-up has brought shares into overvalued territory
at the same time the company has taken on debt to buy back shares that
it believes are undervalued. But there's a large following of believers
who hold that the future growth potential
will outweigh the near-term valuation concerns. At this point, 83% of
the 7,117 CAPS members rating Netflix expect it to beat the broader
market.

© 2009 UCLICK, L.L.C.