With the stock market recently hitting new all-time highs again, times are exciting for people who are fully invested, but these conditions can be more frustrating for those who have cash available to put to work. Higher stock prices do make it a bit tougher for bargain hunters to find deals, but stocks don’t all rise or fall on a synchronized schedule. Some invariably lag behind those broad-market patterns.
The tough part of seeking out bargains among those laggard stocks is that there’s usually a good reason why a company’s shares didn’t participate in the rally. Still, even when there’s a good reason, at the right prices, out-of-favor stocks may well be worth buying.
With that in mind, three Motley Fool contributors went looking for stocks the recent bull market has left behind that might have a bit of life ahead of them, despite Wall Street’s pessimism. They came up with Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), Confluent (NASDAQ: CFLT), and Kinder Morgan (NYSE: KMI). But only you can decide whether they’re cheap enough to be worth a spot in your portfolio.
A mighty drug maker brought low by the market
Eric Volkman (Pfizer): With rare exceptions, star power rarely lasts forever. One example of a company that recently experienced the downside of this dynamic is pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.
A few years ago, Pfizer was a hot item thanks to its heavy involvement in the fight against COVID-19. It was the co-developer of the go-to coronavirus vaccine Comirnaty. On top of that, it is the company behind the well-known COVID antiviral treatment Paxlovid.
In the thick of the pandemic, when hundreds of millions of people were eager to get inoculated, and when treatments for the disease were in high demand, Pfizer experienced big leaps in revenue and profitability.
Even the mightiest company would find it challenging to follow up that sort of performance with a similar second act, and Pfizer is falling short in the minds of many. After all, both its recently released fourth-quarter and full-year 2023 headline figures were down substantially as the pandemic has evolved into an endemic and the…
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