5 best stocks

not home depot or walgreens

PCP AAPL CTRP CFSG NKE

google till 700-750 but no more.

i like rimm alot

apple is good until the day after christmas

Buy FINL. At $4.50, it's a steal. They will rebound back into the $20 range within a year.

Rim stocks went public at $7 a share and are now worth ~$600. This stock continues to amaze me.

HOG is on its way back up.

MARKET EXPARTS

Investing should be about earning the highest return with the least amount of risk. Picking individual stocks without a designing your personal own asset allocation framework isn't the way to go. You are taking on a lot of risk for your expected return. Picking individual stocks without doing a good amount of research is like going to vegas and hoping luck is on your side. I wouldn't have more than 4% of my portfolio in one stock.

High Risk, High Reward

DPDW, TIDE, CXZ, NWOL, TDCP

This could be very lucrative:

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTON17414820071001

Vertex hep C drug shows real promise, limitations

Mon Oct 1, 2007 4:36pm EDT

By Bill Berkrot

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A closely watched hepatitis C drug being developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc continues to promise improvement over current treatments, according to analysts who have viewed brief summaries of data from highly anticipated clinical trials.

The summaries, known as abstracts, of data to be presented in full next month at the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases annual meeting also suggest some limitations and side effects from the drug, telaprevir, analysts said.

"The incremental information provided by Vertex and the (study's) investigators continues to suggest that telaprevir will deliver a sustained virological response (SVR) of 70 percent, or thereabouts, in real world efficacy," Geoff Porges, an analyst with Sanford Bernstein, wrote in a research note.

Other analysts also said the available data appears to add up to an SVR of at least 70 percent in the clinical trial known as PROVE-2. An SVR rate higher than 50 percent is considered to be positive and 75 percent would be viewed as a major success, analysts have said.

SVR is a measure of patients in whom the hepatitis C virus has reached undetectable levels and appears to have been cleared from the system.

The studies are also attempting to show that by adding telaprevir to standard therapy of pegylated interferon and ribavirin there would be a lower relapse rate and significantly shorter treatment duration than without the Vertex drug.

"These results continue to show the potential that telaprevir has to enhance the efficacy of the current standard of care and provide a higher cure rate for patients with hepatitis C virus," said Jason Kolbert, an analyst for Susquehanna Financial Group.

Kolbert did note a potentially worrisome higher patient dropout rate with the PROVE-2 trial than in the earlier PROVE-1 study - 12.5 percent versus 10.9 percent - and the persistence of a troublesome rash seen with many patients who receive the Vertex drug.

Porges said data in the abstracts appear to debunk Vertex assertions that telaprevir could be effectively used without ribavirin, and that ribavirin was the cause of the rash seen in earlier combination studies.

Based on available PROVE-2 data, Porges said, within 12 weeks 25 percent of patients in the telaprevir-plus-interferon group saw the virus rebound from previously low levels compared with 4 percent in the triple-therapy group.

"This means that pegylated interferon with telaprevir but without ribavirin is a non-starter as a regimen for further study," Porges said.

He added that from further analysis of the data, "it is now clear that telaprevir, not ribavirin, was the cause of the rash observed in combination treated patients in PROVE-1."

The limitations "do leave the window open for competitors to enter the market" but do not affect telaprevir's immediate market potential, Porges said.

Vertex shares were up 56 cents, or 1.5 percent, at $39.00 in early afternoon trade on Nasdaq.

Ironic that this thread appeared on the afternoon that the NASDAQ 100 fell nearly 2% in half an hour and AAPL fell 8% in 5 minutes.

Buy the way I own AAPL. I'm not trying to knock your picks.

IS that Blowing Rock North Carolina?

Yep

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK-A)

Start off with 100 shares, you can't go wrong.

It was up $800 today!

IM from Blowing Rock and was just wondering

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has done great. But what happens will Buffett no longer is there to lead it? There is a significant premium to this stock with Buffett as the mofo in charge.

I'm the old guy (44) that runs with ZAP when I'm not injured, which unfortunately I am now.

Berkshire-Hathaway - Look at the returns and the variance of returns versus the SP&500 over the last 25 years. Beats the S&P500 essentially every year (except 1999 when the S&P became over-weighted in tech with its huge downfall the next year) and has a fraction of the variability. A single stock rarely has less variability than a large composite like the S&P500.

Chicken, beef, vegetable, shrimp, and uh... umm... well, those are my top four anyway. A can of beer or glass of wine are options to add flavor if you've got no stock, though you should stock up in the future.