Barron's Top 10 in a Different Prism

The following commentary comes from an independent investor or market observer as part of TheStreet's guest contributor program, which is separate from the company's news coverage.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Last week two major investing publications -- Forbes and Barron's - released their 2011 Top 500 lists of publicly traded companies.

The biggest difference between the two lists are their ranking and inclusion criteria. While Forbes simply takes the top 500 companies by revenues, Barron's does a bit more work and ranks the stocks based on three criteria: revenue growth in 2010, 3-year average cash returns on investment, and 2010 cash returns on investment vs. the median firm.

This makes Barron's list a bit more interesting and much more dynamic. Firms at the top of the list are expected to be fast growing companies that efficiently invest their capital, creating the greatest economic returns for shareholders (whether or not the stock price reflects it, yet).

A couple of weeks ago, MagicDiligence wrote about how the Magic Formula Investing (MFI) strategy could theoretically be applied to any group of stocks. This is a perfect opportunity to put that into motion. I've taken the top 100 non-financial stocks from Barron's list and ranked them by the MFI method.

The result should be a list of efficient, revenue growing stocks that are also have cheap stock prices! The full ranking list can be found here .

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