Novell is an ugly, boring company that has never really succeeded despite being in the tech industry for the past 20 years. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of the best company ever – Google – used to be CEO of NOVL and still couldn't do anything with it. Its ugly. That said, NOVL dominates the Linux space and more and more tech appliances are turning towards Linux is the operating system of choice. A tech "appliance" is a computer that doesn't need all the facny stuff (word processors, video, etc) but is used for primarily one purpose – like a storage device or a router. You don't need Windows XP to run a router. You just need a stripped down open source operating system like Linux. But here's why I love NOVL. Its NEVER going to go out of business. Ever. It doesn't matter how slow it grows, or even if earnings go down. They have $1.2bb in net cash sitting in the bank. Is that cash being depleted? No. They had $400mm in cash flow last year. They have a market cap of only $2.63 billion. Not only is the company never going anywhere, its cheap. And, to help us out on our search for catalysts this week, it has earnings on May 30. Couple of portfolios support the case: Jim Cramer has recommended the stock, calling it a solid tech play. the Jacob Internet Fund has it as a top holding. Ryan Jacob flamed out in the 90s by going into all the tech highflyers. But everyone deserves a second chance and Jacob has more than redeemed himself. He's turned into the ultimate value-oriented Internet investor and has racked up a solid annualized 31.3% rturn over the past 5 years. He's in SOHU, GOOG, among others. So NOVL is in good company in his portfolio. One of my favorite Stockpickr members, mock portfolio, has put together a portfolio of stocks he thinks will do well in a "rate cut/soft landing" environment that he predicts will happen. Mock, when he's not working on Stockpickr portfolios works this summer for a top fixed income manager. And, finally, with earnings coming up on May 30, its worth noting that NOVL makes our list of the 20 most volatile stocks on earnings day.

CDC Corp (CHINA) which makes online gaming and business software for (obviously) CHINA, sold off all last week when a poor earnings report from KONG sent all online China stocks in a free fall. Here's the 5 day chart for CHINA as of Friday morning: This puts the stock solidly on our 3x2 system list. CHINA has historically been one of the most successful stocks in the 3x2 system. Histofically, CHINA has triggered the 3x2 system 29 times since Jan 1, 2006 and has had 24 successes with an average return of 6.25% per trade. the 3x2 system is described here. And every day, to see who is on the 3x2 system, check out our System Trades of the Day. The 3x2 system in general has done very well historically across all Nasdaq stocks. Here's a graphical representation of the annual returns over the past 10 years of this system: Interestingly, CHINA shows up a few weeks ago on the portfolio tracking Gene Marcial's Inside Wall Street picks from Businessweek.

Down 13% on Friday - Investors in Famous Footwear chain operator Brown Shoe Co. took profits Friday, following yesterday's sharp run-up in shares on the company's strong first-quarter report and full-year outlook. This is the classic: Breakout, pullback, and buy play. On top of it, the stock even at these levels trades for less than 8x forward cash flows. My target is for a short-term $30. Note: not every Breakout, pullback, is a buy. LJPC was up big on good drug results, then pulled back big. But I think they use their new lofty shareprice to do a dilutive financing and I would stay away. But BWS is cheap on a cash flow basis so I like it.

I hate to chase, and the stock is already up 10% on takeover rumors but I think it keeps going. Even at these levels it only trades at 5.8x EBITDA and a forward P/E of 11. It can easily be taken out north of $90. Plus looks like a decent breakout past 52 week highs. As Jim says (and convinced me) "its on the 52 week high list for a reason".

Sterling Financial is in bad shape. The company announced on Friday a fraud among its employees that was going to result in a $150mm charge. They only had $36mm in earnings last year so this wipes all of that out. The stock fell almost 40%. That said, the stock probably fell too much. The bank has real assets and the earnings, sans scandal, were real. This company would make a great acquisition candidate and at a forward P/E of less than 8 (again, assuming the scandal has now been contained) I think there will be a lot of speculation about which major bank will make an offer. This is a speculative snapback play.

The stock was only slightly up last week despite my bold prediction of a quick $100. That said, we are seeing global consolidation of the exchange world every single day now. The stock is oversold, has the best management and investors out there, and I'm still expecting a sharp move upwards.

This is another breakout play. Cancer drug stocks are all the rage but the key is finding the drugs that actually works. IDMI is tried and proven and the drug launches next year. Cantor Fitzgerald just put out a price target of $11 and I think this will see north of $4 this week.

The stock announced a PIPE financing the other day where they sold 7mm shares at $2.05. The stock fell 14% and landed at $2.13 by the end of the day. Here's what happens when something like this is announced: all the PIPE funders start hedging their shares by shorting the stock. It creates massive artificial selling pressure. I run a fund of PIPE funds and see this everytime. However, wait one more day, Wednesday, then buy and hold for 1-2 days. There will be a post-PIPE bounce. There isn't always such a bounce but often there is. Worth of a speculation if this has one more day of selling off.