This year has been tough for investors. The inflation numbers may have been down in October, but it was still 7.7% compounded on last October’s 6.2%, and that’s too high. Interest rates are rising fast in response, making capital more expensive, and the available cash is chasing goods constrained by tight supply chains and continued COVID lockdowns in China. Food and energy prices are high, and likely to rise, as Russia’s war in Ukraine puts a major clamp on global supplies of natural gas, wheat, and cooking oils. It’s no wonder that stock markets have been highly volatile, making it ever more difficult for investors to predict what’s coming next.
But even with all of those headwinds, there are stocks we can be thankful for this Thanksgiving holiday season. These are the market’s proven performers, the stocks that have brought sound returns to investors despite all the challenges that 2022 has through at the markets.
The positive attributes of these winning stocks are reflected in their Smart Scores. The TipRanks Smart Score takes the collected data on every stock and collates it by 8 separate categories, each of which is known to correlate with positive stock performance going forward. The Smart Score gives each stock a single-digit score, on a scale of 1 to 10, making it easy to tell at a glance the shares’ main chance in the coming months.
Generally, stocks that get a ‘Perfect 10’ on the Smart Score will show solid results in each of the 8 factors, but that’s not a hard and fast rule. Pulling up the Smart Score data on two stocks that have hit that goalpost, we find that they offer investors a solid foundation and a good combination of strengths. Let’s take a closer look.
ConocoPhillips (COP)
We’ll start in the energy industry, where ConocoPhillips is one of the sector’s largest legacy names. ConocoPhillips boasts a market cap of $158 billion, along with operations in 13 countries and production on the order of 1.5 million barrels of oil equivalent daily. Annual revenues hit $46 billion last year, and has already beaten that total this…
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