Two stocks to buy before Tuesday's Annapolis peace conference


As Middle East leaders prepare to convene together, again, I was looking for some ways to play this event in my portfolio via Israeli Ingenuity, something we discuss a lot at IsraelNewsletter.com. This time around, the location is Annapolis, Maryland, site of the U.S. Naval Academy. Tuesday's conference aims to relaunch Israeli-Palestinian peace talks for the first time in seven years. Looks like almost everyone is going to attend. Even Lebanon looks ready to join the U.S., Israel, the Palestinians, and Syria in making history.

I'd be a buyer here of Elbit Systems (NASDAQ: ESLT), an Israeli defense contractor working on some large deals and really cool technology. BloggingStocks' Aaron Katsman wrote this past week about the anti-hijacking technology Elbit is marketing and this will certainly come in handy in Annapolis while each attending party will be working diligently to secure its best interest at the expense of all the others'. We've been here before and most of us do not so readily imbibe the peace kool-aid as in years past.

The second company I'd be buying here is Answers.com (NASDAQ: ANSW). Answers.com is an Israeli internet firm that runs an answer-based information portal providing users with answers covering millions of topics. I hope the participants in Annapolis are using Answers.com to find a path to peace because from where I'm sitting, it doesn't look particularly promising.

Answers.com, which gets a lot of its traffic from search monolith, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), is in the process of acquiring the parent company of Dictionary.com, in a bid to secure more organic search traffic to its site. Dictionary.com may come in handy for Annapolis participants to find the definition of "disappointment" when this is all over.

Zack Miller is the lead equity analyst for America Israel Investment Associates, LLC., the managing editor of IsraelNewsletter.com and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund. Author's fund holds a position in ESLT but not in ANSW.

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Last updated: February 10, 2012: 02:31 AM

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