9 Analyst Stocks Under $10 With Massive Upside Calls

Investing

Published: July 17, 2016 10:25 am

Last Updated: March 13, 2020 4:09 pm

The week of July 15 amazingly brought new highs for the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Many investors have supposedly gotten out of many stocks, and there have been many unusual hurdles for the current bull market. The reality is that investors are still looking for ways to find value and make money.

24/7 Wall St. reviews dozens of analyst research reports each morning, which ends up being hundreds of them each week. The goal is to find new investing and trading ideas for our readers. Some analyst reports cover stocks to buy, while others feature stocks to sell or to avoid.

When it comes to the stocks that analysts want you to buy, the projected upside in Dow and S&P 500 stocks is generally in the range of 8% to 15% at this stage of the bull market. But there are very speculative companies that often come with far higher upside projections of 25%, 50% or even over 100%. These are often in stocks with micro-cap or small cap valuations, or in stocks under $10 per share.

Before investors get too excited to hear about upside calls of this magnitude, there are some real life issues that can get in the way. Sometimes analysts just get their views entirely wrong. Sometimes outside forces or unexpected events scuttle the upside story. Sometimes management just blows it. And then there is the notion that what was hoped to be just could not be or was not accomplished due to the limitations of today.

It is important to remember that there is no free lunch on Wall Street. There are even instances when analysts and investors make huge upside predictions that actually come true but the market just won’t value the underlying story at what was once hoped. It happens, and sometimes these companies go into zombie mode or even implode and disappear.

Here are nine stocks under $10 in which analysts gave massive upside calls during the week of July 15. In an effort to keep readers from only considering the bullish case here, 24/7 Wall St. has tried to provide offsetting remarks or another side of the story in some cases. After all, we wouldn’t want you thinking that we believe all these grandiose upside scenarios will magically happen, as if they were preordained.

Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) won several mid-week comments from analysts on its ability to win from the latest licensing pact extension with Samsung. Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and BMO Capital Markets all chimed in with very positive analyst calls. Nokia could be a winner in advanced communications, and the Alcatel-Lucent merger left Nokia with a clean balance sheet. Shares closed at $5.92 on Friday, in a 52-week range of $5.01 to $7.63 and with a market cap of almost $34 billion. Nokia’s consensus analyst price target for its American depositary shares is $7.09. The flip side of Nokia of course is that its great upside stories have always seemed to run into hiccups in a very competitive field, and ditto for the Alcatel-Lucent operations. Also, mergers of this sort can be extremely difficult to make work due to corporate and international cultural integration risks.

Oasis Petroleum Inc. (NYSE: OAS) was raised to Buy from Neutral with a $12 price target at Ladenburg Thalmann. This July 13 call compared with a $9.33 prior close, but Friday’s closing price was down at $8.64. Oasis has a $11.60 price target, but analyst targets go as high as $20.00 for this speculative oil stock. Its 52-week range is $3.40 to $14.15. On the more cautious side, investors should keep in mind that Oasis is expected to lose money in 2016 and 2017, and it may even lose money in 2018, based on current consensus estimates.
SLM Corp. (NYSE: SLM) was started with a Buy rating at Citigroup on July 14. It was assigned a price target of $8.50, versus a $6.96 prior close, in the call. Shares ended the week at $7.10, with a $9.38 consensus target price and a 52-week range of $5.09 to $10.04. The old Sallie Mae is a company that has managed to keep going and going, reinventing itself in the challenging and highly regulated student loan market. Needless to say, the government gets hostile about companies making profits off of students who are generally already burdened with student debt.

Whiting Petroleum Corp. (NYSE: WLL) was raised to Outperform from Neutral on July 13 by Credit Suisse. The price target was $14. The prior close was $8.80 and Friday’s close was $8.52. The consensus price target is $13.71, and the 52-week range is $3.35 to $30.68. Much of the upside was around the Williston basin and hopes for increases in 2017. Note that Whiting lost money in 2015, and the consensus estimates indicate it will lose money in 2016, 2017 and even 2018.

MeetMe Inc. (NASDAQ: MEET) was already rated as Buy at JMP Securities, but on July 15 the firm raised its price target to $8 from $5. The prior close was $6.04, but MeetMe closed up 4.5% at $6.34 on Friday. Its 52-week range is $1.47 to $6.45 and its market cap is just over $300 million. MeetMe is a multilingual social media network designed for users to meet new people rather than just interact with existing friends. The company claims roughly 90% of its traffic comes from mobile and that it has more than a million total daily active users. When you think of social media, competing against Facebook and other established players may not be that easy. It also recently acquired a services called Skout. Its total revenue was $13.3 million in the first quarter of 2016, up 15% from the first quarter of 2015.

Other key analyst calls in stocks under $10 in the week of July 15 were as follows:

With a $9.84 close on Friday, Energy Recovery Inc. (NASDAQ: ERII) barely made the under $10 club this week. It was started with an Outperform rating at FBR Capital Markets and assigned a $14 target price on July 15. The 52-week range is $2.07 to $13.35, and the consensus price target is $13.00, but it still has a street high target of $16.00 and a street low of $8.00.

On July 12, IDI Inc. (NYSEMKT: IDI) was started with an Outperform rating at Barrington Research. The firm issued a $7 price target, versus a prior $4.86 closing price, and shares ended the week at $5.12. IDI has a $235 million market cap, and the consensus price target from a handful of analysts is $9.00. The company is in risk management, fraud detection, debt and receivable monitoring/collecting, and helping to target new customers.

Canaccord Genuity raised New Gold Inc. (NYSEMKT: NGD)to Buy from Hold on June 12. The stock closed at $4.86 ahead of the call and at $4.69 on Friday. Its 52-week range is $1.76 to $5.01, and the market cap is $2.4 billion. Just a couple of weeks ago, 24/7 Wall St. pointed out how New Gold was one of five medium to large gold stocks trading at or under their implied book values despite gold’s massive recovery in 2016.

Red Lion Hotels Corp. (NYSE: RLH) was started with a Buy rating and assigned an $11 price target (versus a $7.53 prior close) at B. Riley. This July 12 call did move the stock, as it closed at $8.14 on Friday. The company has a mere $164 million market cap, and the share have a 52-week range of $5.45 to $9.55, with a consensus analyst price target of $11.50.

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