Shareholders of Palm, Best Buy, and Aeropostale may be singing holiday cheer while Verizon, Sears, and Saks shareholders might have reason for Bah Humbug

In the final weeks of the holidays last year (December 8 to January 5), Palm's stock price (PALM) more than doubled. The company recently caught my attention when I read the results of our latest “What do you want for the holidays?” survey. The Palm Pre surfaced as one of top cell phones consumers requested. Some of the speculation in the last year’s soaring price may been tied to the launch of the new low end Centro at $99 or it could have been the slight hint of positive news coming from the Motley Fool.

While past performance is not an indicator of future performance, the holidays are here again and Palm has released the Pre, available for just $79 on Amazon.com, or $20 less than the Centro last year. On top of that, Motley Fool has issued another favorable review. As if that weren’t enough, now we have a survey showing the Pre ranks higher on consumers’ wish lists than Verizon’s heavily advertised PDA and smart phones (Samsung, HTC, and Droid). This strong second-place showing for Palm could translate into greater demand for Palm’s shares, which stood at $11.67 when the market opened on Monday, December 7 .

The survey reflects the opinions of 3,800 consumers ages 13 to 44 asking “What do you want for the holidays?” Here’s how they responded when asked

• 18% indicated they wanted “A new cell phone” without specifying which model
• Among the respondents who did name a specific phone, the iPhone was a runaway winner, named by 77% of these consumers
• Approximately 8% put the Palm Pre atop their list—more than the Motorola Droid, HTC Hero, HTC Droid, and any Samsung phone, which cumulatively tallied only 3% of the responses 
• "Clothes" grabbed 45% of the responses and are the gift consumers want most for the holidays. 
• “A new TV” is the next most favored item at approximately 34%. 
  

In the same trading period mentioned above (open on December 8th 2008 to close January 5th 2009), a few other stocks caught my attention: Aeropostale (ARO up +4.5%) and Best Buy (BBY up +25%) on the positive side and Verizon (VZ was down -4.47%), Sears (SHLD was down -13.92%), and Saks (SKS was down -19.71%) on the negative side.

While, Best Buy and Wal-Mart (WMT dropped -3.5% during this period last year) will probably dominate the new TV market now that Circuit City is out of the picture, Aeropostale may lead the way in the retail stocks. Of those respondents asking for “clothes” who named a particular clothing store, Aeropostale was the most requested clothing store at 36% followed by Hollister, American Eagle, Abercrombie & Fitch, and then Hot Topic.

One thing is clear: If husbands, wives, parents and children buy what their loved ones really want for this year’s holiday season, these companies should post solid sales results for this quarter. I’ve published the full list of stocks I researched for this analysis. Please feel free to share and post comments.

To be fair to the companies listed in this blog, the follow up survey:

• Which clothing store are you most likely to shop at?
  
• Which new cell phone would you like to have?

(Click on picture below to enlarge)