From Russia, with..?

Tobias Levkovich, chief U.S. equity strategist at Citigroup, and John Connor, portfolio manager of the Third Millennium Russia Fund, discuss the Russian Republic, its armed conflict with Georgia -- and whether your investments are safe in Vladimir Putin's nation.

To hear Nicholas Kaiser tell it, growth is the secret ingredient in a successful portfolio.

His four-star Sextant Growth Fund is up an average of 11.42 percent per year over the last five years.

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His first growth pick is Noble Corporation.

"So far, this stock has traded with oil, rather than with the earnings, so we have an opportunity to buy into the stock today," Kaiser told CNBC. "This is a company with 62 offshore rigs, building three more of these -- they're very expensive, [but] very profitable right now."

Despite the possibility of a long-term consumer slowdown, Kaiser also likes Hewlett Packard.

"The company, under Mark Hurd, has really done a turnaround," he said. "Thirty percent of its top directors and managers have been replaced, and earnings growth is very solid...so we're seeing that the big issue is their new diversification into services, and the purchase of EDS."

• Want more? Watch the entire CNBC interview (1 min, 57 secs)

Disclosures:

Disclosure information for Nicholas Kaiser was not immediately available.

Disclaimer

Some people pick stocks on the news. Some people pick stocks on hunches. MKM Partners' chief market technician Katie Stockton relies on the charts. They can point an investor toward some counter-intuitive moves. For example, her first pick mixes real estate with technology.

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The pick is Digital Realty.

"Technology has proven to have very strong positive relative strength," she said. "We've also seen signs of life in the REIT sector, so, to combine those two sectors, the potential there, we look at Digital Realty."

Runner-up on her list is Procter & Gamble.

Everyone has a favorite story about an innovative company whose shares were once a bargain. Those stories usually end with a heartfelt, "If I had only known..." Morningstar equity analyst Michael Tian has a list of innovative companies selling at bargain prices right now.

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His list begins with Applied Materials.

"They are the behemoth in the semiconductor tool industry," he told CNBC. "They basically have engineers in almost every chip-manufacturing facility in the world; these guys have to come up with new products every few years in order to keep themselves fresh and relevant."

He also likes Autodesk.

Jon Hilsenrath, money and investing news editor at The Wall Street Journal, offered CNBC his weekly "Five for Five": the five stocks investors must watch this week.

After Wall Street's best week in a long time, Black Rock vice chairman and CIO of global equities has some moves to recommend to investors.

"Oil's down, the dollar's up, stocks are up, and the U.S. is outperforming on the upside," Bob Doll told CNBC. "I think what we're seeing here is, the U.S. is the best house in a bad neighborhood, for the moment."

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Doll still favors multinationals, but his view is changing slightly.

""I do think you need to supplement your portfolio with a few U.S. names, some consumer names, some health-care names that I think have been doing well here and have reasonable fundamentals," he said.

He likes Express Scripts, McKesson, and Pfizer in health care; and WalMart and Kroger in the consumer sector.

Investors looking to cash in on water should look to opportunities in the "total water cycle," where companies look to address the global imbalances of the natural resource, Rainer Ottemann, head of fund sales for Germany and Austria at KBC Bank Deutschland, said Monday.

"Water may be the most underestimated resource in comparison to traditional resources, because it has much more significance to humans," Ottemann told "Power Lunch Europe."

Ottemann likes wastewater utilities like Severn Trent and Veolia in Europe, as well as Aqua America .

Airline stocks are not the only ones thriving as oil prices continue to fall. Analyst Lee Klaskow of Longbow Research suggests it may be time for investors to climb back into the cabs of trucks.

"We recently upgraded the sector from underperform to a neutral weight, based on a survey that we published," he told CNBC. "The survey was really telling us that a lot of capacity was coming out of the market."

Recommendations:

"We just upgraded Heartland (Express) to a buy from neutral," he said. "It's one of the best in class, short- to medium-haul truckload providers. It also has a best-in-class operating ratio."

Klaskow is less enthusiastic about YRC Worldwide.

"We wouldn't be buying it at these levels," he said. "YRC is in the midst of a turnaround, and we view it more as a work in progress. There's some execution risk, as the company tries to improve its regional network and its national networks."

Mark Travis is going to Starbucks. The CEO of Intrepid Capital Funds says it's probably time to take advantage of the coffee titan's recent misfortunes.

Starbucks made headlines this summer by announcing it would close hundreds of its under-performing stores, and Travis notes that that's not the first time that's happened.

Investments to resist the slowdown: David Pearl of Epoch Investment Partners and David Moon of Moon Capital Management offered CNBC their insights -- and favorite stocks.

Moon agrees with Pearl about the need to re-categorize many household- and personal-product makers, currently considered consumer-oriented:

"Most high-end pharmacological purchases are not discretionary," Moon told CNBC.

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(See Part 1 for Pearl's view and stock picks )

Moon pointed to Johnson & Johnson as an example: "We like them, even [considering] the consumer portion of their business." He also named Pfizer, whose necessary medicines outweigh "discretionary" products like Viagra.

"We're actually buying both (J&J and Pfizer) right now," Moon said.

He also praised Walmart, eBay and MGIC Investment.

(See Part 1 for Pearl's view and stock picks )