When stocks fall fast and far, they sometimes set themselves up for remarkable rebounds. The following equities suffered dramatic drops over the past week. With help from the 180,000 members of Motley Fool CAPS, we’ll see whether any of them have the potential to bounce back.

It’s been a while, but thanks to last week’s sell-off, we once again have a chance to stand beneath Mr. Market’s silverware drawer in hopes of snagging a bargain. Let’s meet today’s contenders.

Companies are selected by screening on finviz.com for abrupt 5% or greater price drops last week. Recent price and 52-week-high data provided by finviz.com. CAPS ratings from Motley Fool CAPS.

Five super falls — one superball
What a week. Every day for the past five days, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone higher and higher. Four days in a row, we hit four new record, all-time highs. Yet despite all the good news, somehow, more than 1,700 separate stocks actually lost money last week. So what went wrong?

Beginning at the bottom of the list, we find a couple of obvious answers. Direxion Financial Bear 3X and Direxion Small Cap Bear 3X are, respectively, exchange-traded funds that bet heavily on financial stocks and small-cap stocks going down, rather than up. In theory, at least, every time these stocks-as-groups decline one point, the ETFs that bet against them gain three points. So you can imagine what happens when the stocks they’re betting against, instead of declining in price, hit new all-time highs.

Less clear is the case against VirnetX Holding. Two weeks ago, the company won a big court victory  in its patent suit against Apple. The prospect of being able to collect on its $368 million jury verdict should be good news for VirnetX. On the other hand, though, investors may be starting to wonder: Even assuming the company gets to collect its $368 million, what is there to justify the remaining $1.36 billion worth of this profitless, revenue-less company’s market cap? (And if the answer turns out to be “nothing,” then why would you want to own it at this price?)

Next up: Atlantic Power. This one looked more like a Power-outage last week, when its Q4 earnings report featured a big revenue miss, “dismal” earnings, and a halving of the dividend. When a company’s expected to earn only a nickel yet somehow manages to lose $0.45 a share instead, you can’t expect investors to react well to that news — and they didn’t.

But enough of the bad news. For a change …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance