6 GARP Stocks That Should Grace Your Portfolio

If you’re looking for a profitable portfolio of stocks that will offer the best of value and growth investing, try the growth at a reasonable price or GARP strategy. It helps an investor gain exposure to stocks that are undervalued and have impressive growth prospects.

However, one should not confuse GARP investing with the blend strategy. While the blend strategy promotes investment in both value and growth stocks, GARP investing requires both value and growth features in a single stock.

GARP Metrics – Mix of Growth & Value Metrics

The GARP approach prefers stocks that are priced below the market or any reasonable target determined by fundamental analysis. These stocks also have solid prospects in terms of cash flow, revenues, earnings per share (EPS) and so on.

Growth Metrics

Strong earnings growth history and impressive earnings prospects are the main concepts that GARP investors borrow from the growth investing strategy. However, instead of super-normal growth rates, pursuing stocks with a more stable and reasonable growth rate is also a tactic of GARP investors. Hence, growth rates between 10% and 20% are considered ideal under the GARP strategy.

Another growth metric that is considered by both growth and GARP investors is return on equity (ROE). GARP investors look for strong and higher ROE compared to the industry average to identify superior stocks. Moreover, stocks with positive cash flow find precedence under the GARP plan.

Value Metrics

GARP investing gives priority to one of the popular value metrics – price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio. Though this investing style picks stocks with higher P/E ratios compared to value investors, it avoids companies with extremely high P/E ratios. Moreover, the price-to-book value (P/B) ratio is also considered.

Using the GARP principle, we have run a screen to identify stocks that should offer solid returns in the near term.

Screening Parameters

Along with the criteria discussed in the above section, we have considered a favorable Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 (Buy) to make the strategy foolproof.

Zacks Rank less than or equal to #2 (Only Strong Buy and Buy-rated stocks can get through.)

Last 5-year EPS & projected 3–5 year EPS growth rates between 10% and 20% (Strong EPS growth history and prospects ensure improving business.)

ROE (over the past 12 months) greater than the industry average (Higher ROE compared to the industry average indicates superior stocks.)

P/E and P/B ratios less than X-industry average (P/E and P/B ratios less than that of the industry indicates that the stocks are undervalued.)

These few criteria have narrowed down the universe of over 7,700 stocks to only nine.

Here are six of the 10 stocks that made it through the screen:

Insperity, Inc. (NYSE:NSP) is engaged in providing an array of human resources and business solutions. The company delivered an average four-quarter positive earnings surprise of 8.3% and carries a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

CBRE Group, Inc. (NYSE:CBG) is a commercial real estate services firm providing advisory services, capital markets services, valuation services to occupiers, owners, lenders, and investors in office, retail, industrial, multi-family, and other commercial real estate assets. The company came up with an average four-quarter positive earnings surprise of 18.7% and carries a Zacks Rank #1.

Credit Acceptance Corporation (NASDAQ:CACC) is a specialized financial services company, which provides funding, receivables management, collection, sales training and related services to automobile dealers. The company’s average four-quarter positive earnings surprise is 6.7% and it carries a Zacks Rank #1.

MSCI Inc. (NYSE:MSCI) is a leading provider of investment decision support tools to investment institutions worldwide. The company has an average four-quarter positive earnings surprise of 5.6% and carries a Zacks Rank #2.

Home Depot, Inc. (NYSE:HD) is the one of world's largest home improvement retailer. The company has an average four-quarter positive earnings surprise of 3.8% and carries a Zacks Rank #2.

Aetna Inc. (NYSE:AET) is one of the nation's largest health benefits companies and one of the nation's largest insurance and financial services organizations. The company has an average four-quarter positive earnings surprise of 19% and carries a Zacks Rank #2.

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Disclosure: Officers, directors and/or employees of Zacks Investment Research may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material. An affiliated investment advisory firm may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material.

Disclosure: Performance information for Zacks’ portfolios and strategies are available at: https://www.zacks.com/performance.

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