Below we highlight the best performing Russell 3,000 stocks since the March 9th, 2009 low as well as since the October 9th, 2007 market peak. As you'll see, the majority of the stocks that have done the best since March 9th are still down significantly from their 10/9/07 prices.

The real winners are the stocks that are up the most since the October 9th, 2007 market peak. These companies have seen big gains even as the market pulled back more than 60% before rallying again this year. Kirkland's (KIRK) has done the best since 10/9/07 with a gain of 1,111%. KIRK rose 170% during the 10/9/07-3/9/09 bear, and has since rallied an additional 348%. Other stocks that did well during the bear market and the current bull market include BSTC, BPSG, GTE, MITI, EBIX, JRCC, and NFLX.

Ebix Inc. (EBIX) has been an incredible investment this year. The shares began 2009 trading in the mid-20’s before hitting a low of $17.12 in the early days of March. Since that time, the stock has rallied 279% to its most recent close of $64.91 and the stock could still have farther to go. Estimates for earnings continue to be ratcheted higher, and even yesterday after an incredible rally, the valuation still looks relatively attractive.

The software and services company has developed a strong business serving the needs of insurance companies across the United States. Their solutions cover a wide range of technology needed by groups and independent agents, and the expertise has allowed the company to carve out quite an attractive niche and grow market share. Now that the company has proven successful and grown into a market leader, Ebix has its sights set on a much larger target market.

1. Large-cap tech moves to fresh 52-week highs: One of the most impressive aspects to last week’s action were the moves in large-cap tech names such as AAPL, AMZN, BIDU, CRM, EBAY, GOOG, IBM and SY. With these tech bellwethers rising to fresh 52-week highs, on massive volume, we are looking for further institutional inflows to these names. This should create a herd-like mentality around this group going into year-end.

Tuesday's Wall Street Journal had an article that asked the question "Can Rally Run without Revenue?" Is the revenue situation really that bad?

Let's take a quick look at some the data compiled through the Alert HQ process.

If you've had CNBC on today, you have undoubtedly heard that today is the 5-year anniversary of Google's (GOOG) IPO. Someone on the channel even called it the most important IPO of all time. While buyers of GOOG's IPO have certainly made money (+423%), to call it the most important IPO of all time is a bit of hyperbole. Historically, there have been plenty of IPOs that have made investors more money over similar or shorter periods of time. BIDU and FSLR are just two examples of IPOs that have returned more than 800% in a shorter period of time. Additionally, of the current Russell 3000 stocks that were around at the time of GOOG's IPO, 38 have returned more to shareholders over the same time period.

The 38 stocks that are up more than Google over the last five years aren't all penny stocks either. Many of the names highlighted below have market caps of more than $10 billion. The only stock on the list that is larger than GOOG, however, is Apple Computer (AAPL), which has gained more than twice GOOG's 423%. Hmm. Maybe it was a case of stock envy that recently caused GOOG CEO Eric Schmidt to resign from Apple's board.

Fortune Small Business is out with its annual FSB 100 list, which measures the fastest growing (by revenues) publicly-traded small business listed on U.S. exchanges. As always, it is both fascinating and frustrating.

Though the FSB 100 has many intriguing prospects, it is horribly laid out and almost impossible to assess in the format provided. For example, there’s no way on the FSB site to get a handle on the market cap of the list except one company at a time. It's another instance of a layout designed to generate unnecessary page views (and advertisement cpm’s) at the cost of reader convenience.

Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

March 16, 2009 11:00 am ET

The following is excerpted from a recent note that Singular Research sent to clients:

Growth Play

Ebix, Inc. (EBIX) is an international provider of software and e-commerce solutions for the insurance industry. It focuses on the sale and support of its insurance carrier systems, broker/agency management systems and exchange family of products, which provide connectivity between consumers, agents, carriers, and third party providers. It also provides services for software development, delivery of software as an application service provider (ASP), software license, maintenance and business process outsourcing. EBIX trades 8x our 09 eps estimtate. We project 35%+ eps and revenue growth. The company beat estimates last quarter by 13%; eps estimates are revised higher for 09. All are extrememly rare events in this environment.

Panic is irrational by definition. Remember Y2K? My mother was stockpiling water and canned goods; there were a bunch of people filling sheds preparing for the second cold-war. If you’re good, you can always take advantage of bad times. Still don’t believe me? I’ll point out Dick Fuld as the most recent example. Fear is raining down and I’m sowing seeds of opportunity. It’s earnings season. I’m trying to grow a “fortune.”

The companies are sorted in descending order from their categories by my personal allocations. All my comments are relative to historical market performance, future market expectations, and current pricing of industries and the S&P 500 in general. I try my best to find highly successful companies trading at prices that ignore their risk/reward potential (all prices as of yesterday morning).

Singular Research's Annual "Best of the Uncovereds" Conference Presentation

Q2 2008 Earnings Call

August 1, 2008 11:00 am ET

Allow me to start out by illustrating that I’m paying my college tuition with proceeds from the stock market. In fact, I’m making more in the stock market than I do as an engineer, and I’m only investing 40K.

Below you will find my current holdings and my reasoning behind holding each one, but first, what do they have in common? They all have historically exhibited huge growth potential and show little to no signs of stopping. They are all priced ridiculously cheap for this potential. The stock market is a huge grocery store, and if you see 59-inch plasma TVs on sale for $5, it only makes sense to purchase a few… right?

EBIX is small, undiscovered and relatively illiquid and as a result it sells for a steep discount to the valuations of other IT services companies - but given its track record since 2000, you have to take this company seriously.

EBIX is profitable, generates substantial cash (typically over $1.00 per share per year) and is growing internally and through acquisitions. At $19.60 EBIX is selling for 11.6X its annualized first half '06 EPS of $0.84 and has approximately $1.00 per share in net cash. By way of comparison, Infosys (INFY) an Indian IT services company currently trades for over 40x earnings.