Top Stocks For 2011, Best Stock Investments For 2011, Hot Stocks For 2011

Diane Cunningham of Colorado Springs, Colo., no longer has a flat-screen television. She decided to sell it... so she could buy a shotgun.

Colorado Springs shut off a third of its streetlights this past winter, The New York Times reports, in order to save $12 million on electricity. Shortly thereafter, a chain of events convinced Ms. Cunningham she needed to be armed.

"Her tires were slashed, she said. Her car was broken into. Strange men showed up on her porch. Her neighborhood had grown deserted at night..."

Meanwhile, in East St. Louis, Mo., Reverend Joseph Tracy is convinced guns are the problem. (Guns in the hands of criminals, that is.)

The Dow was flat yesterday. Gold rose $9 to $1,226.

Has the dip in gold already come and gone?

We were expecting lower stock prices...and lower gold prices too. Both went down earlier in the summer. But neither went down as much as we expected...nor stayed down.

But it's still fairly early in this correction. The recession began at the end of '07. We're now approaching the last quarter of '10.

By this time in the '30s, top stocks were hitting rock bottom. The market crashed in the autumn of '29...then bounced...and then started down again. It didn't stop until it hit bottom in July of '32 - nearly three years later. By then, top stocks had lost nearly 90% of their value, from 381down to 41.

It can take longer, however. Japanese stocks crashed in '90. But they didn't hit their ultimate bottom until 2008 - 18 years later - with losses of about 90%.

Every year, I go to the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver, both as speaker and attendee. It's jampacked with people from all over the world who gather at the Fairmont Hotel to share ideas. As soon as I walk into that grand old railway hotel, I know there will be some surprises. This year was no different.

Ideas were not in short supply, but some ideas were more common than others. More than a few speakers spoke well of gold and oil. Most had dim views of the economy and the hot stock market of 2011. And there were at least a handful whose best ideas hailed from some emerging market.

A couple of my favorite ideas came from investors based in Dubai and Moscow. Whole markets rarely go on sale, but here we have two examples of hot stock markets trading for about 6 times earnings.

Peter Cooper is our man in Dubai, as you may remember, and a friend of mine. From his perch in Dubai, he writes an interesting investing newsletter called ArabianMoney. He is also a self-made millionaire who made it in the Middle East. He sold out near the top. But now, Peter says Dubai is a buy again. In fact, Peter says, the whole United Arab Emirates is a buy.