With most stocks getting hit in the past week, it’s hard to find a stock that’s at a pristine buy point.  And, frankly, even if I saw one, I’m not sure it would work out–when the market is under pressure, good stocks can go bad in a hurry.  So I want to highlight a company with a new product, with outstanding sales and earnings growth, and whose stock is probably the strongest in the entire market–in other words, it’s a potential winner once the bulls re-take control.

The company is STEC Inc. (STEC), which I’ve written about a few times in both Cabot Market Letter and Cabot Top Ten Report.  On the surface, the firm appears to be just another semiconductor firm, producing solid-state (read: flash) drives.  And there’s nothing special about that; SanDisk and others produce flash memory for many consumer devices, and at this point, flash is just a commodity product.

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However, STEC Inc. does not produce flash memory for consumer products–it’s targeting large-scale commercial uses like servers and huge storage devices.  And it turns out these drives are NOT run-of-the-mill; STEC Inc. has basically no competition, and that’s a big deal because the drives save tons of component and power costs (up to 50%!) and boost performance markedly when compared to hard disk drives.

IBM is using STEC’s drives in two of its most popular storage and server systems, Fujitsu is using STEC’s drives in one of its storage systems, and Hewlett-Packard is also a big-time customer.  Right now, demand is so strong that STEC just upped its second quarter earnings guidance … causing a massive 30% jump in the shares.

Honestly, I do think you could nibble here, maybe buying a token position … but I’m content to simply watch it closely and wait for a better-looking entry point.  If the market has indeed shrugged off its case of the jitters, I expect STEC to enjoy further upside.  Keep it high on your own Watch List.