MW These 10 top-rated stocks are crushing the S&P 500 - yet the media and Wall Street ignore them
By Mark Hulbert
Stocks with little coverage tend to outperform well-known and widely followed peers
Neglected stocks are worth your attention.
Would you be interested in a stock that has gained 60% over the past 12 months with below average volatility? Of course you would.
You'd never discover this stock by reading the news, however. The company, Ames National $(ATLO)$, a bank holding company based in Ames, Iowa, doesn't get much publicity. Only one industry analyst covers this small cap.
Out-of-sight, out-of-mind companies - so-called neglected stocks - tend to outperform those that are in the news. That's because stocks about which there is a lot of news attract more investor attention, which in turn tends to push up their prices - and thereby reduces their future returns.
This tendency has been documented over the years. One study found significant correlations between a stock's volatility and the extent of coverage among Wall Street analysts and the intensity of news coverage. As a result, the authors concluded, there is greater "demand for volatile stocks, which results in their over-pricing and their production of inferior returns in the future."
Each of us can readily recognize this phenomenon. Robin Powell of The Evidence-Based Investor described it this way in a recent column for the Times of London: "You know how it goes. Someone at a dinner party mentions a stock they have bought, and suddenly everyone has an opinion ... It's the future of something. You'd be mad not to own it. These are always the same kinds of companies - high-profile, fast-moving, in the news every week. The sort of stock that makes you sound clever for owning it."
His point: "Nobody ever holds the [dinner] table's attention" if they talk about "boring" stocks like Ames National.
With this in mind, I constructed a table of neglected stocks. I started with all that are currently recommended for purchase by any of the investment newsletters that my performance auditing firm monitors, then narrowed it to include only those that (a) have beaten the S&P 500 SPX over the past year; (b) have experienced below-average volatility over the past year, and (c) have had no news stories in the Dow Jones Newswires feed so far in 2026.
The 10 with the lowest trailing-year volatilities are listed in alphabetical order.
Ticker Stock ATLO Ames National Corp. BKH Black Hills Corp. CFG Citizens Financial Group CTBI Community Trust Bancorp Inc. NJR New Jersey Resources Corp. NTRS Northern Trust Corp. NWN Northwest Natural Holding Co. SRE Sempra SR Spire Inc. TTC Toro Co.
Mark Hulbert is a regular contributor to MarketWatch. His Hulbert Ratings tracks investment newsletters that pay a flat fee to be audited. He can be reached at mark@hulbertratings.com
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-Mark Hulbert
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March 28, 2026 13:04 ET (17:04 GMT)
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