Tax Reform in This Election Year: It's Not Likely
Which Credit Card Rewards Does the IRS Care About?For 25 years, Steven Halpern, editor of TheStockAdvisors.com, has surveyed the leading financial newsletter advisors asking for their favorite stocks for the coming year. This article is one of 100+ ideas in the Best Stocks for 2008 report.
"Stericycle (NASDAQ: SRCL) is an almost perfect business -- an absolutely essential service, but nobody wants to do it," says Dave Dyer in his Dave Dyer's Newsletter, referring to his more conservative favorite for 2008.
"It is about as close to being a monopoly as you are likely to find, especially in a critical national industry. Stericycle is the acknowledged leader in the unglamorous but necessary task of medical waste disposal.
"It is 12 times bigger than its nearest rival and SRCL is the only vendor able to provide services on a nationwide basis, which means that the large, nationwide customers have only one good option unless they want to deal with multiple vendors.
"The highly regulated nature of its business acts as a convenient barrier to entry by potential competitors. And even if someone does manage to start a competing company, there is a good chance that SRCL will buy them.
"The price performance of the stock has been very impressive. SRCL has made a steady move from under $4 in 1997 to about $60 today. It had steady gains even in the poor markets of '00, (up 102%), '01, (up 60%) and '02 (up 6%).
"The stock had a 28% gain in 2006 as it continued to beat the market every year. It is up 55% year-to-date in 2007. If you can tell me when there will be less medical waste, I'll tell you when this stock will go down."
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