5 Rocket Stocks Ready for Blastoff

BALTIMORE (Stockpickr) -- Even though the broad market is still stammering after Friday's 1.6% pullback in the S&P 500, a new set of Rocket Stocks is fueling up for blastoff this week.

Friday's pullback was even more painful for NASDAQ stocks, the index crashing 2.25% by the session's close as pressure from jobs numbers and black clouds from Europe blew over trading floors in New York. This morning, things aren't looking much better thanks to massive selling in Asia and to a much lesser extent in Europe today.

All told, last week took 2.44% out of the S&P 500, ringing in the biggest weekly loss in 2012. That sort of "record setting" decline is more significant for the headline effects it'll have on investors than the actual implications of the pullback. At this point, the S&P remains cautiously strong from both a technical and fundamental perspective. With the tail end of earnings season wrapping up this week, piling more money onto the S&P's record corporate profits could help snap investors out of "risk off" mode.

>>5 Stocks Under $10 Set to Soar

With all of this going on behind the scenes, it makes sense to pay attention to the Rocket Stock names that are fuelling up on strong performance right now.

For the uninitiated, "Rocket Stocks" are our list of companies with short-term gain catalysts and longer-term growth potential. To find them, I run a weekly quantitative screen that seeks out stocks with a combination of analyst upgrades and positive earnings surprises to identify rising analyst expectations, a bullish signal for stocks in any market. After all, where analysts' expectations are increasing, institutional cash often follows.

In the last 150 weeks, our weekly list of five plays has outperformed the S&P 500 by 80.92%.