If nobody doesn't like Sara Lee, then how has this high PowerRating stock eluded our Stock Spotlight for so long?

Sara Lee (SLE | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating) has been a high PowerRating stock for months, and as the stock has pulled back during the broad market correction that began in the fall of 2007, the stock's PowerRating has only increased. An 8-rated stock when Sara Lee was trading near its 200-day moving average in early December, Sara Lee's PowerRating has climbed to a perfect "10" as the stock has pulled back.

The PowerRatings chart of Sara Lee goes a long way toward showing investors and long-term traders just how PowerRatings work. When dealing with high quality stocks, the sorts of stocks that earn the higher PowerRatings, those PowerRatings tend to increase as the stocks pullback. This means that the stock is a more attractive investment the cheaper it gets.

This is a key difference between the PowerRatings approach to investing and long-term trading and other approaches which seems to suggest that stocks are instead more attractive the more expensive they get. Our method is based fundamentally on buying low and selling high. This means, among other things, that as stocks pullback and become less expensive, we become more interested rather than less.

And now with a PowerRating of 10, Sara Lee has joined that class of stocks that our research suggests will be more reliable and a better performer than the majority of stocks in the market. Studying thousands and thousands of simulated trades since 1995, we discovered that 10-rated stocks were higher one year later more than 80% of the time. Compare the reliability of 10-rated stocks to that of the average stock, which was higher one year later less than 68% of the time.

In addition, as a stock with a PowerRating of 10, Sara Lee is likely to outperform the average stock after one year. We found that 10-rated stocks tended to average gains of approximately 20.17% in a year's time. The average stock, by comparison, tended to gain between 12-13% after one year.

It is also worth mentioning that Sara Lee is the top ranking member of an industry group, Processed and Packaged Goods, which has a high PowerRating in its own right and is absolutely loaded with high PowerRatings stocks. There are Kellogg (K | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating) and General Mills (GIS | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating), both with PowerRatings of 9. And there are another six 8-rated stocks below them: Conagra Foods (CAG | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating), Campbell Soup (CPB | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating), Del Monte Foods (DLM | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating), McCormick & Company (MKC | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating), Pepsico (PEP | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating), and J.M. Smucker (SJM | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating).

All nine of these stocks have the sort of high PowerRatings that investors should be looking for when adding stocks to their investment or long-term trading portfolio. But at the moment, Sara Lee, with its PowerRating of 10, is truly the belle of the Processed and Packaged Goods ball. Last trading some 18% off its 200-day moving average, Sara Lee at these levels is not likely to remain long out of investor favor.