StanChart shares could rise as much as 30% in the next year, if the company can take advantage of its fast-growing developing-markets base and its solid balance sheet.

Peabody's stock could double to about 70 in the next few years as the global economy improves and coal demand rises.

Assured (AGO), with a market value of $2.85 billion, did dabble like its peers in guarantees of other "structured securities" products backed by what turned out to be dodgy mortgage paper. But the company was far more conservative in its underwriting standards, demanding what is known in insurance parlance as higher attachment points on its policies. This meant that any securitization it insured would have to shoulder, say, losses up to 40% of the value of the portfolio before Assured was on the hook for its first dollar of claims. As a result of all of this, Assured's stock has rallied some 60% from the start of the year, to a recent 18. But the stock could still have a long way to go. In fact, based on the combined earnings power of Assured and FSA -- the merged company could earn nearly $950 million a year, or more than $6 a share, in a normal year, versus $2 or so this year -- the shares could ultimately double or even triple.

Steris has rallied almost 54% to a recent 30, since early March. The stock could keep climbing to 40 as capital spending revives and the company's earnings grow.

If AVI's drug for the worst form of muscular dystrophy moves toward FDA approval, the stock could surge. The company also may become an acquisition target for Big Pharma.

As the bottom-feeders of the culinary world, fast-food restaurants are susceptible to unemployment, and Yum investors are especially sensitive to any faltering in China. Thankfully, expectations are low, with analysts bracing for flat Chinese sales and single-digit U.S. declines. With the help of benign food costs and cooperative exchange rates, results might prove better than expected. Bucking the corporate trend, Yum! also nudged its dividend up 11% -- to $0.84 a year, for a 2.5% yield -- and it plans to buy back $300 million worth of stock. At about 33, "shares reflect either an unjustified China discount or an overly conservative outlook," says Credit Suisse analyst Keith Siegner. The stock trades at 14.1 times 2010 earnings -- merely in line with the restaurant sector and below multiples of 19 times for Wendy's (WEN) and 22 times for Starbucks (SBUX). Siegner thinks Yum's "international footprint and ongoing reallocation of capital from low-growth to high-return regions justify a premium to its peer group," and pegs the stock at 17 times his forward estimate, or 41.

We're still bullish on Coke, which could rise to the low $60s in a year. The stock yields 3%. Emerging markets represent 15% of Coca-Cola's sales volume, but have produced 25% of the company's growth over the past three years. (Latin America, where the company has long had a strong presence, isn't included in that emerging-markets number.) Sales in India are growing at 33% annually, albeit from a small base. Improved distribution and strong local brands are helping to drive that growth. Coke looks pretty cheap. At 16 times 2010 earnings estimates, it trades at a modest premium to the S&P 500. Over the past 10 years, the premium has averaged 26%. At a 20% premium, the stock would be worth $62. Coke probably will grow earnings at a high-single-digit rate over time; a weaker dollar could lift profit growth higher in the near term. If Coke's share price and dividend rises in line with earnings, investors will get a 12% annual return over time. We wrote our first Alert on Coke in May 2008, when the shares were $56.50. They're down 5% since then, while the market is off 26%. The market is likely to remain volatile but the long-term trend is up. Coke's shares will be less volatile, and their longterm trend could be up even more.

In a careful but necessarily conjectural sum-of-parts estimate, Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett figures MSG is worth $2.8 billion, $9 per Cablevision share, based mostly on the cable sports network's earnings, a prospective value of the Knicks and New York Rangers and the real estate held. The remaining Cablevision businesses -- a more familiar mix of cable and other media assets -- are worth a bit more than $18 per Cablevision share, says Moffett, for a consolidated value of around $28. That's more than 20% above Cablevision's last-trade price of $22.64. By these lights, Cablevision looks like a low-risk Buy. The trick is that MSG might not trade up to that implied asset value, especially given that almost no one owns Cablevision for the Knicks and the Rockettes. As Moffett points out, while the MSG assets (the building, the teams, the network) have substantial hypothetical value, they are unlikely to be sold soon. The most desirable scenario might be for the noise surrounding MSG to further soften up Cablevision's share price. Yet with the stock down 10% since mid-September, it's getting into a zone where it looks attractive even without making optimistic assumptions about where MSG will trade.