Aug. 10--With the economic outlook slowly transitioning from recession to recovery, prices for lots of badly battered stocks have jumped -- as reflected in a 49 percent rise in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index from its bottom in March.

Among those previously pummeled shares are stocks that topped the monthly Wisconsin Ticker in July. Shares that were trampled as investors fled the market earlier in the year jumped in July, pulled higher by the general rally in stocks, analysts said. Whether those and other stocks that have risen with the tide can keep it going is the big question.

"Most of them are still well, well below their highs of a couple of years ago," said Todd Parrish, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. in Milwaukee. "This is kind of classic with recovery psychology -- pretty powerful rallies before there is any real evidence of improved numbers."

The Wisconsin Ticker, a Bloomberg News program that calculates how much a $1,000 investment would be worth at the end of certain time periods, showed that a one-month investment in July would have given owners of Journal Communications Inc., Oshkosh Corp., Waterstone Financial Inc., Modine Manufacturing Co. and MGIC Investment Corp. a boost of at least 50 percent.

Although in different industries, one thing all have in common is that they are the kind of stocks likely to react more extremely to swings in the overall market, said Chas Janisch, director of research for Wisco Research LLC in Madison.

"And as such, they have been acting as they are supposed to relative to the markets, providing investors with supercharged returns when the market turned in its best monthly return for July in decades," Janisch said.

But Janisch doesn't believe any of them can maintain that kind of price rise over the mid- to long-term.

John Collopy, director of research for Brigg-Ficks Securities LLC in Milwaukee, said the outlook for the Wisconsin Ticker's top gainers in July depends "almost 100 percent on how the overall market does."

"If the overall market stays relatively firm -- perhaps not to the degree it has since the middle of March -- they probably will be OK, but not sensational," Collopy said. "They probably will be performing decently. If the market rolls over again -- I don't know if it's going to, but I'm sure there's going to be a respite here at some point -- they're going to have to work hard to stay at least even with where they are right now."

Among July's top five, Oshkosh, which recently received contracts worth more than $2 billion from the government to make military vehicles, is the only one on Collopy's recommended list.

But given the big rise in the price of shares that were oversold during the gloom of early March, Parrish said the market may "get a little more tentative."

"You have money that went in at the bottom and now has seen significant gains," Parrish said. "The fundamentals really wouldn't seem to warrant this sharp of a recovery, but again, that's what happens when you get that deep of a sell-off."

Parrish said many companies have reduced expenses and managed the economic downturn well, which could set the stage for better performance when the economy improves.

"We believe we've seen the worst. And for many sectors, all you have to do is look at the second-quarter numbers that have been pouring in over the last month," Parrish said. "The top line -- the sales numbers -- were not heroic. They weren't great for most companies. But the earnings were good. Which just shows you that most corporations are really managing themselves very well, have cut expenses. Obviously, that's where the big unemployment numbers come from, which implies that there's a lot of leverage to the upside when sales do improve."

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