Investing

7 Speculative Analyst Stocks Called to Rise 100% or More

Jon C. Ogg

Published: May 1, 2017 11:20 am

Last Updated: January 12, 2020 12:28 pm

The bull market has raged on for more than eight years now, and the major stock market indexes are all up more than 200% from the V-bottom lows of 2009. Despite many scares and many threats, the appetite for stocks remains quite strong and investors have managed to find myriad reasons to buy each and every market pullback. Those same investors are also looking for new ideas.

24/7 Wall St. reviews dozens of analyst research reports each day of the week in an effort to find new ideas for our readers. For established Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 stocks, most new Buy and Outperform ratings from analysts come with upside targets of 8% to 15%. But some analysts who cover the very speculative small cap stocks have Buy ratings with huge upside targets of 50%, 100% or even more.

Of the many hundreds of analyst calls from April 2017, 24/7 Wall St. has highlighted seven very speculative analyst calls from the past month in which the analysts were calling for 100% or higher upside and where the calls were still active and had not been rescinded as of May 1, 2017.

Investors need to understand that there are serious risks in small cap stocks. Even the most seasoned investors likely will not have heard of some of these companies. Some of them are so small or unknown that we have never even reported on them.

Many investors believe that they can find better value and upside potential in small cap stocks than established stocks. Again, investors better understand that they are also taking far greater risks than traditional Dow and S&P stocks. Many small caps will crash and burn, can suffer business failures, can face delisting from the exchanges or can become zombie companies with no real business nor any real direction.

Low-priced stocks with tiny valuations are almost never suitable for conservative investors. None of these would pass the traditional “widows and orphans” suitability test. Also keep in mind that analysts make errors from time to time, just like everyone else, and the major upside thesis can often change in an instant. Just because one analysts sees great upside doesn’t mean that the outcome is assured.

24/7 Wall St. has issued 11 crucial warnings for value investors in 2017, and those warnings would even be more amplified in these small cap stocks. We have also featured more defensive, high-dividend stocks that would likely hold up better than most stocks if an overdue market correction hits in the summer of 2017.

Here are seven very speculative analyst stocks — again that are full of more risk than the broader stock market indexes — called to rise 100% or exponentially in 2017 or into 2018.

Alimera Sciences Inc. (NASDAQ: ALIM) was started with a Buy rating at Rodman & Renshaw in the final week of April, but what stood out was the $4 price target, which is well over 150% higher than the $1.46 prior closing price. Alimera had a 52-week trading range of $1.01 to $2.58 and a market cap of just $95 million. When the stock closed out April at $1.60 a share, its market cap was up to $104 million or so.

The company has data from 25 Iluvien pivotal and post-marketing studies and two presentations on diabetic retinopathy, which will be presented during the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology from May 7 through May 11.

Fusion Telecommunications International Inc. (NASDAQ: FSNN) was started with a Buy rating at B. Riley on April 26. The firm assigned a $3 price target, implying more than 100% upside from the $1.43 prior closing price, with a market cap of only about $35 million. Fusion Telecom shares ended April at $1.61, in a 52-week range of $0.96 to $2.46.

This analyst call came on the heels of the company announcing it secured $2.1 million over five years to provide single-source cloud solutions to a leading Midwestern and Southeastern health system.

Quotient Ltd. (NASDAQ: QTNT) was started as Buy at BTIG Research on April 18, and it was assigned a $22 price target, which compares to a $6.28 prior closing price. BTIG did participate in underwriting a securities offering shortly before this maker of diagnostics testing for blood grouping and serological disease screening was given such a big upside call. Quotient was indicated up 11% at $6.95 at the time, due to the massive upside price target, and it closed out April at $6.81. Quotient has a 52-week range of $3.75 to $12.96 and a market cap of about $250 million.

Superconductor Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: SCON) was raised to Buy from Neutral at Rodman & Renshaw on April 6, but the price target of $3 represented more than 100% from the $1.46 prior closing price. This stock was initially up 17% at $1.72 at one point on the day the big upside call was made, and it ended April at $1.69 a share, with a market cap of just about $16 million or so. The 52-week range is $1.04 to $4.50.

Superconductor Tech makes high-temperature superconductor wires using the Conductus HTS wire products for superconducting high-power transmission cables. It has a history of losing money and hardly generates any real revenues at this time, but that may change quite soon. The firm feels that Superconductor Tech has passed multiple hurdles and that it can now maintain structural integrity while meeting the critical current carrying capacity requirement.

Synacor Inc. (NASDAQ: SYNC) was started with a Buy rating at Canaccord Genuity on April 18. While this was after a secondary offering that the firm was involved in earlier in April, the $8 price target represented more than 100% in implied upside to the $3.55 previous closing price.

Upcoming growth was cited by Canaccord Genuity for a future rerating of this growth company in that call. Synacor has a 52-week range of $1.35 to $4.25 and very limited analyst coverage. The market cap is about $130 million. The month-end share price in April was $3.55.

TG Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: TGTX) was started with a Buy rating and assigned a $23 price target at Jefferies on April 25. This represented more than 100% upside, given the $10.40 prior closing price. TG Therapeutics ended last month at $11.06, in a 52-week range is $4.10 to $15.05. Its market cap is about $620 million.

The firm felt that TG Therapeutics is undervalued, based on the long-term promise of ublituximab, TGR-1202, and TG-1303 (ubli + 1202) in B-cell cancers and multiple sclerosis. Jefferies even believes an FDA precedent exists for accelerated approval based on objective response rate.

TherapeuticsMD Inc. (NYSEMKT: TXMD) saw one of the calls that investors are often leery of: a big price drop but the analyst remains unphased with a massive target. Jefferies reiterated its Buy rating on TherapeuticsMD on April 11 with an $18 price target. This was right after it received an FDA letter about deficiencies in its treatment of moderate to severe dysparaeunia. Jefferies sees this not being a death sentence and did not back away from its upside target.

The stock’s $6.20 prior closing price was continued lower over the course of the month, with TherapeuticsMD closing out April at $5.10, with a $1 billion market cap and a 52-week range of $4.39 to $9.29.