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.

"For the investor who has some money with which he or she is willing to take some risk, I suggest they take a look at the regional banks ETF iShares Dow Jones US Regional Banks (NYSE: IAT), which I've selected as my top speculative pick for 2008," notes Leonard Goodall, CFA and editor of No-Load Portfolios.

"I recommend this ETF for two reasons, a fundamental reason and a timeliness reason. From a fundamental perspective, most of the regional banks in this portfolio have good solid financials and they know their areas of service well enough to avoid the worst aspects of the current real estate crisis.

"The three largest holdings in the fund -- US Bancorp, Suntrust Bank and PNC Financial -- all have records of consistently improving earnings over the last five years. US Bancorp and Suntrust have raised their dividends each of the last five years, and PNC has raised its dividend in three of the five.

"Purchase of the fund now is timely because its price has been pushed down along with all financial stocks that have been the victim of the subprime mortgage crisis.

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.

"For a conservative investor who wants to incur only low to moderate risk, I would recommend a well-established mutual fund, the Fidelity Puritan Fund (NASDAQ: FPURX), as my top pick for 2008," says Leonard Goodall, CFA and editor of No-Load Portfolios.

"This is a balanced fund, with a portfolio that includes about 67% stocks, 26% in bonds and the rest mainly in cash. A major problem for most mutual fund investors is that the return they actually receive from a fund is well below the announced return on the fund.

"This is because they make bad-timing decisions. They buy the fund after it has run up in price and then sell it after it has suffered a downturn.

"The researchers at Morningstar have produced some work recently that suggests that for balanced funds the return that investors actually achieve is closer to the announced return of the fund than for most other types of funds.