Nine Stocks Set to Launch

Editor's Note: Jon D. Markman writes a weekly column for CNBC on MSN Money that is republished here on TheStreet.com.

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Outside of crooked CEOs, few players in the investing world are the subject of more derision than momentum traders, people who buy stocks that are rising rapidly with the expectation that they'll go higher.

It's the usual Wall Street hypocrisy at work. You see, everyone says they want to be like Warren Buffett and focus on long-term value. But deep down, when the after-work martinis are flowing, most reveal that they really want to be like Buzz Lightyear and find stocks that will go "to infinity and beyond!"

So at this time of year, when animal spirits are stirred by good cheer and rising indices, let's take a week's break from our usual search for cheap, neglected, low-risk stocks that might find favor one day and take a look at pocket rockets whose fuses are already lit and which might take us on a wild ride. At least for a couple of weeks.

Finding vehicles to share with the "mo-rons" is most certainly not rocket science. You just fire up a screening engine like the one at MSN Money or StockCharts.com -- electronic filing cabinets filled with stocks sortable by 400-plus numerical criteria -- and search for companies that are up the most in the past year, quarter and month.

Weed out the penny stocks traded on iffy exchanges such as the OTC Bulletin Board, as well as ones that have market capitalizations under $100 million, prices under $3 or trade less than 50,000 shares a day, and you land smack in the momentum traders' playground, complete with monkey bars.

Investing in Inertia

The theory behind buying these sorts of stocks is pretty basic: Just reference the work of the great 17th-century speculator Sir Isaac Newton, whose first law of motion states, in part, that "an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction "unless acted upon by an unbalanced force." That's translated from Latin, so to make it a little more plain, it could read: "What goes up will keep going up until it doesn't."