5 Underperforming S&P Stocks to Buy Now

Despite the current pullback, Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has returned a solid 12% over the past year.

(Image credit: istockphoto)

Despite the current pullback, Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has returned a solid 12% over the past year. Not every stock in the index has gained, of course. Many, in fact, have lost ground. Are any of those stocks worth buying? To find out, we sifted through the index’s losers over the past 12 months and sorted out those that our favorite stock fund managers have recently acquired, as well as those that are favorably rated by Wall Street analysts. We settled on five companies. All are contrarian bets and come with above-average risk, and all will require some (or maybe a lot of) patience and grit.

Disclaimer

(Share prices and returns are as of October 15.)

Nellie S. Huang
Senior Associate Editor, Kiplinger's Personal Finance

Nellie joined Kiplinger in August 2011 after a seven-year stint in Hong Kong. There, she worked for the Wall Street Journal Asia, where as lifestyle editor, she launched and edited Scene Asia, an online guide to food, wine, entertainment and the arts in Asia. Prior to that, she was an editor at Weekend Journal, the Friday lifestyle section of the Wall Street Journal Asia. Kiplinger isn't Nellie's first foray into personal finance: She has also worked at SmartMoney (rising from fact-checker to senior writer), and she was a senior editor at Money.