David Fording says there are good stock opportunities out there -- if you look for high quality. The co-portfolio manager of the William Blair growth Fund named four stocks for a long-term plan.
Recommendations:
Fording began with his No. 1 pick: Qualcomm.
"We look for high-quality, durable business franchises — and Qualcomm is one of them," Fording told CNBC. "Qualcomm fits our model of a market leader that's under some pressure because of cyclical concerns."
He says the firm dominates the next-generation wireless network space and will continue to pick up market share as 3G networks roll out.
"On the chipset side, Qualcomm is grabbing market share from Freescale Semiconductor and Texas Instruments ," he said.
What about slowing handset growth? Fording acknowledges this as "a legitimate concern" — but notes that Qualcomm has already guided down aggressively.
Fording sees an angle in unemployment worries: for-profit education companies that enable workers to spruce up their resumes and profiles. His pick: Capella Education.
"It's a smaller-cap company, it trades at 4 percent free cash flow yield -- not bad for a high-growth company." He says that the firm has enjoyed 18 to 19 percent enrollment growth over the past few weeks.
Fording's other two picks are IDEXX Labs and Gilead Sciences.
Disclosures:
Disclosure information was not available for Fording or for his company.