Bargain alert: 3 large caps with RSIs that scream oversold

Key Points

• Align has been bouncing hard from last month's gap down, with more gains looking likely.
• Albertson is attractive enough to justify takeover interest from Kroger, and their shares had a good summer. 
• Paycom has just been given a fresh Buy rating with a price target pointing towards a 40% upside. 

Everyone likes to feel like they're getting a bargain when buying something. It's no different when it comes to buying stocks. One of the most widely used technical tools for assessing a stock's value is the Relative Strength Index (RSI). Each stock has one, and it assesses a stock's recent performance over the past 14 trading days, assigning a numerical value within the 0-100 range. 

An RSI above 70 signals overbought conditions, while a reading below 30 indicates oversold conditions. The more extreme the reading within this range, the more pronounced the suggested market condition.

With the equity market having turned back northwards these past two weeks after a poor couple of months, many stocks are registering their best run of gains this year. Indeed, the benchmark S&P 500 index has just logged its longest winning streak in two years.

So, with the return of a risk-on sentiment starting to pull investors back into stocks, it's a great time to see what stocks were perhaps beaten down more than they deserved and if any are still oversold. With that in mind, here are three large caps with RSIs of 30 or below. 

Align Technology, Inc. NASDAQ: ALGN

Align Technology manufactures 3D digital scanners and aligners used in orthodontics. They have a market cap of $14 billion and a fairly stable revenue engine. This past June's earnings report was the business's highest quarterly turnover since the end of 2021. 

Yet for all that, their shares are down more than 70% from 2021's high and are currently back trading at 2017 levels. They also have an RSI of 25, indicating extremely oversold conditions. This has been primarily due to a 25% gap down in Align shares late last month after the company cut forward guidance in the face of macro headwinds. 

However, shares are already up off the lows, and the RSI is well on its way to losing its oversold tag, having at one point this month been as low as 12. Align has its work cut out for it to undo the damage from last month's warning, but it's looking like investors might have been overly pessimistic, which is a good thing for bargain hunters.

Albertson Companies, Inc. NYSE: ACI

This Idaho-based grocery store has been around since 1939 but only IPO'd in 2020. Things were going well until the start of last year when their shares got caught up in the market-wide selloff, and they spent the first half of 2023 consolidating and forming a fresh base.  

Then came a 20% rally through the start of September, which is currently being undone in such a fashion as to drive the stock's RSI down to 26. However, this feels unjustified as the company topped analyst expectations in last month's Q2 report and has been flirting with rumors of a takeover from Kroger NYSE: KR. 

Even if this deal doesn't come to pass, the value of Albertson is apparent in that one of the top grocery businesses wants to buy them out. For those of us on the sidelines, that means that these currently oversold prices offer an interesting entry point with an attractive risk/reward profile. 

Paycom Software, Inc. NYSE: PAYC

Shares of this payroll and HR tech company have been under pressure since the end of July and recently hit their lowest level since 2019. Paycom has delivered a run of bad numbers and weak forward guidance, and these days, investors don't need a whole lot more to exit en masse.

But with an RSI of 27, which was recently as low as 15, you have to be wondering if they've overreacted here. The team over at UBS certainly thinks so, as they rated Paycom shares a Buy last week. They also slapped a fresh price target of $235 on the stock, which, from Friday's close, points to an upside of about 40%. 

Sure, the longer-term outlook mightn't be all that reliable, but in the short-term, at least, we can expect some kind of a snapback in Paycom shares. They closed out last week at their high, indicating strong demand right up to Friday's close, which also bodes well for this coming week.