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

Enjoying your morning cup of coffee? Would you enjoy it as much if it cost you two bits more? How about a dollar more?

Just the other day, Justice wrote to you as to how wheat futures seemed to be picking up the pace a bit. But that's not the only commodity that's kicking it these days. Coffee beans have been on a real "caffeine jag," gaining some 79% in 2010, with about 9% of that coming on in the last week or so.

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With raw goods costs rising like that, J.M. Smucker Co. (SJM:NYSE) has been forced to raise prices 9% on some of its popular U.S. brands, including Folgers, Millstone and Dunkin' Donuts. This hike follows close on the heels of a 4% increase last May. Tot it all up and your average mug of steaming java is up about 13% over the past few months.

In case you missed the news, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) recently surpassed Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) in market cap.

Revenue is also set to surpass MSFT this year.

It's even more impressive when you consider the fact that Apple has done it with only 9% of the PC market they set out to take from Microsoft 25 years ago.

The performance of Apple stock over the past decade is enough to make you wish you'd sold your house and piled in. It's up 3500% from April 2003 levels, when it briefly traded in the mid $6s.

Check out this chart of Microsoft and Apple since 2002:

Top American Stocks For 2011: iShares Silver (SLV)

By Gene Arensberg

As you know from watching Viral Investing: Turning Market Chaos Into Cash, I have been predicting a sizable downturn in American top stocks for 2011. The depressants are manifold, not the least of which is the onset of the next leg of the "Great Recession" that began in 2007.

But more important than any singular piece of information is the way in which investors understand and act on available data. And the rate and fashion of memetic uptake is cyclic and predictable.

WaveStrength attempts to combine both sides of the equation. It establishes large groups of investors' predisposing cyclic framework, and then tracks the pool of existing information as it enters that framework.

Right now, the central bundle of memes that I have been tracking could be labeled as "Investors' Lost Faith." The core idea is that most every investor out there has known for months that this last bullish cycle would end in the same fashion as the previous two.

However, anticipation of a third massive crash has accelerated the rate at which we would arrive at the next crisis. Indeed, I believe that we are already past that critical point.