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Four Stock Picks From a 5-Star Survivor
We know all too well about the victims of the market's recent misfortunes, but what about those who have survived — and even thrived?
Count Tom Forester and his five-star Forester Value Fund among those.
"We stayed out of financials, we went long into safer areas like consumer staples and health care, and we've really been able to ride out this market unscathed," he told CNBC. "We actually think that we're going to be positive this year."
Recommendations:
Still, one of his fund's top five holdings is a bona fide financial, US Bancorp [USB
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"US Bancorp doesn't quite have the exposure to a lot of the toxic stuff that's been chewing up and eating up a lot of the other banks," he said. "They're also located largely in the Midwest, some areas that haven't seen a lot of the extreme price volatilities like you've seen on the coasts."
Another stock in the top five is Microsoft [MSFT
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"Microsoft is selling below 10 times earnings, and we haven't seen that in 10 or 20 years now," he said. "We think it's going to weather the storm quite well, and position itself quite well for the recovery when it comes."
Forester also likes Pfizer [PFE
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"Pfizer's another company that's selling at only seven times earnings, just unheard of," he said. "As this funding crisis is affecting health-care stocks, they're going to be able to pick up assets on the cheap, and grow that company even faster."
Rounding out his list of up-and-comers is ConocoPhillips [COP
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"It's been hit with oil prices here, but Conoco is a great stock," he said. "It's got a lot of refining, which should be doing quite well with lower oil prices; people are starting to buy more gasoline; we think that'll be a winner here over the next year."
Disclosures:
Disclosure information for Tom Forester was not immediately available.
Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes
