Investing

8 Analyst Stock Picks Under $10 With Massive Upside Targets

The stock market has again challenged new all-time highs and the Nasdaq is over that elusive tech-bubble peak above 5,000 again. So what if it took 15 years to get back? The current bull market is also over six years old.

With many Wall Street analysts and market strategists calling for even more upside from stocks ahead, investors are on the hunt for value stocks and companies that are either undiscovered or overlooked by the rest of the market.

24/7 Wall St. reviews dozens of analyst reports each morning. The goal is quite simply to find new trading and investing ideas for our readers. While some analyst calls cover stocks to buy and some cover stocks to sell, the weekend reviews of all analyst calls leaves many stocks that are trading under $10 in which analysts see enormous upside potential. The caveat here is that low-priced or small-cap stocks often come with more risk than Dow or S&P 500 stocks.

Analyst calls in Dow Jones Industrial Average stocks may be for upside of 10% or 20%. In the low-priced or small-cap universe, analysts often issue upside calls of 30%, 50% or even 100%. That also confirms that the stocks are much riskier by nature — the higher the risk, the higher the potential reward.

24/7 Wall St. would remind its readers that analyst calls frequently do not live up to expectations. Some of the riskier stock calls even feel like they are all-or-none gambles. To prove the point, some of these less than $10 stocks remain as small-cap stocks for years. Many of them even implode, or end up getting delisted.

ALSO READ: 4 Dividends and Buybacks That Should Not Be Ignored

Investors sometimes believe that small-cap and low-priced stocks eventually grow into huge companies. If history has proven one point, it is that only a few companies make it big while many languish or fail.

These are the eight analyst stock picks under $10, and they have been broken out into two groups to highlight the riskier picks from the far more risky picks.

Callaway Golf

With Callaway Golf Co. (NYSE: ELY), it was unclear whether it would make the under $10 club, but a $9.89 closing price on Friday let it slide under the radar. Of course it took a slight sell-off after earnings to get there, as well as a downgrade to Market Perform from Strong Buy at Raymond James. Still, there was one call that was meant for long-term value and special situation investors. Jefferies gave Callaway a huge price target of $16 earlier in the week, but it was no earnings analysis — it was about the rekindled interest in golf from youngsters, and its stake in TopGolf.

Grupo Aval Acciones y Valores

Goldman Sachs raised Grupo Aval Acciones y Valores S.A. (NYSE: AVAL) to Buy from Neutral on Wednesday. This was at $9.19 prior to the upgrade, and the American depositary shares (ADSs) rose 3.2% to $9.49 on the day of the upgrade. It also closed even higher at $9.69 on Friday, and it has a 52-week range of $8.45 to $13.92. As this was an ADS call, there is no official U.S.-listed price target seen for this bank and financial services provider based in Colombia.

ALSO READ: Why Apple Dividend Hike and Buybacks Matter More Than Earnings

Groupon

On Tuesday, Groupon Inc. (NASDAQ: GRPN) was reiterated as Buy with a $12 price target at Sterne Agee. This call was on the heels of the company’s Ticket Monster stake sale and its $300 million stock buyback announcement. After closing at $7.11 on Friday, this leaves implied upside of close to 68%, if the firm’s target lives up to plan. Just keep in mind that this is far more aggressive than the $8.89 consensus price target, and it is well above the 52-week range of $5.18 to $8.43. In fact, readers might want to consider that $12 is also the highest analyst price target of all 19 analysts that Thomson Reuters identifies with formal price targets.

Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent

This is a two-in-one call here. Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) and Alcatel-Lucent S.A. (NYSE: ALU) were raised to Overweight from Equal Weight at Barclays mid-week, due to the benefits of the merger. These are ADSs, so price targets were in European terms. What 24/7 Wall St. would remind readers is that the interest seems to be more cautious now that the terms of the deal looked like Alcatel-Lucent is selling its long-term holders down the river. Barclays seemed much more positive than the real views we have seen elsewhere.

What investors need to consider here is that mergers of this size are supposed to be transformative. The problem facing Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent is that these are two tech giants that have already endured massive change with a long-term decline. They are also trying to merge a Finnish company with a company that already had issues integrating the full French and American operations into a stable set of units.

Regions Financial

On Wednesday, Regions Financial Corp. (NYSE: RF) was reiterated as Buy at Compass Point, with a price target of $11.50. The bank’s prior closing price was $9.73, and the stock closed at $9.58 on Friday. While this leaves an implied upside of about 20% before considering the 2% dividend yield, there was a downgrade from a much larger firm this week to make sure that investors know there is a balance here. RBC Capital Markets downgraded Regions Financial to Sector Perform from Outperform midweek, but it had an $11 price target in the call.

ALSO READ: 5 Cheap Large Cap Stocks to Buy in a Pricey Stock Market

And the Rest

In order to keep the lesser known and micro-cap stocks separate, 24/7 Wall St. has included three more analyst calls below.

A firm called Craig Hallum started SMTP Inc. (NASDAQ: SMTP) at Buy on Wednesday, and the firm’s $11.50 price target implied more than a double from the $4.98 prior close. Even then, the shares rallied over 6% to $5.30 on Wednesday. Shares went from $5.00 to as high as $5.40 after the call, and the stock closed at $5.33 on Friday.

24/7 Wall St. cannot stress enough to readers that this micro-cap stock’s market cap of $29 million leaves even more implied risk than most other low-priced and small-cap stocks. SMTP is a business-to-business marketing and communications outfit with extremely thin trading volume, and it is hardly followed by analysts.

Bovie Medical Corp. (NYSEMKT: BVX) was started as Market Outperform with a $5 price target at JMP Securities on Tuesday. Before the call, the closing price was $2.48, but shares rose on the call and closed at $3.19 on Friday. This implied a double on the analyst call, if JMP Securities is right, but it left an implied 56% upside as of Friday’s close. Bovie has a market cap of only $74 million, and it has a 52-week range of $2.20 to $5.00.

On Friday, H.C. Wainwright started DARA BioSciences Inc. (NASDAQ: DARA) as a Buy with a $2.00 price target. This was versus a prior $0.77 closing price, and shares closed up 5% at $0.81 after the analyst call. Keep in mind that this is only a $16 million market cap, even if it does trade about 250,000 shares on average days. This positive call is after DARA acquired the exclusive North American rights to Oravig, but the company also has a $30 million shelf registration statement that was filed back on March 27.

One of the last times that 24/7 Wall St. even covered DARA was back in 2011. This was when the stock rose 24% to $2.82 on a day that the Dow was down about 500 points. The boost was on news that its investigational drug KRN5500 had been granted Fast Track designation by the FDA as a treatment of chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain. It had a $14 million market cap at that time, and that was even after the big gain.

ALSO READ: The 20 Largest Privately Held Companies in America

Again, almost all small-cap and low-priced stocks come with far larger risk than blue chip stocks. To prove a point: only five members of the S&P 500 have a share price that is less than $10, and only three of those five are under $9.00.

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