What opportunity
----I'm watching most closely now."

Louis James
Chief investment strategist, Casey Metals Division

"I'm excited about the exceptional volatility I see ahead for 2013. Disciplined speculators will be able to make a lot of money by waiting for the volatility to give them chances to buy low and then taking profits whenever they have them.

As an example, in the Casey Investment Alert we just recommended buying stock in a company we've liked for years, but held off recommending until now because of what we believed was market valuation well in excess of what the company could claim to have in asset value in the ground.

Fast forward to last week: market volatility and tax-loss selling put these shares on sale for 70% off, just as the company released an excellent first-pass 43-101-compliant gold resource estimate. The company went from having essentially no proven resources to having what looks to have the potential to turn into a world-class deposit – and it has plenty of cash to advance it. By being disciplined, we pretty much bottom-ticked our entry point and are now tucked in for what should be a very exciting and profitable ride.

That's exactly the kind of opportunity we're currently watching for most closely."

What opportunity
----I'm watching most closely now."

Marin Katusa
Chief investment strategist, Casey Energy Division

"I've come across a company whose principals were key players in developing the Bakken Oil Shale formation before their company got bought out by ConocoPhillips.

Their new company has built up an inventory of assets that are geologically comparable to the Bakken, but better in my opinion because in the area they are now working, the company gets paid in the higher Brent prices, and there's no fracking required. The chairman is so convinced of the new company's potential that he put $20 million of his own money into the only private placement the company has done in the last six years.

All told, the company has locked up the rights to over 500,000 acres in 5 production licenses and 3 exploration licenses, primarily in northwestern Germany. All the production licenses are mature fields that were abandoned in the early 1990s when the price of oil was low and modern technologies were not yet available. The strategy is to re-enter these abandoned fields and use the latest horizontal drilling technologies to maximize recovery. As these are wells in formerly producing basins rather than wildcat wells, the drilling risk is much lower.

As an aside, this was the same strategy used to unlock the potential of the Bakken.

Compared to North Dakota, northwestern German fields have several advantages: lower transportation costs, less competition for quality acreage, as well as oil being sold at Brent instead of WTI Prices.

There's much more to the company than this, including a farm-in agreement with GDF Suez, one of the largest utilities in Europe, on a very prospective field in Lower Saxony, Germany.

The company is cashed up, has the land, the drill targets, and will be drilling in 2013. In my view, this stock has 10-bagger potential."

(Ed. Note: When Marin says "10-bagger potential," he refers to the potential of earning a 1,000% investment return – so that for every $1,000 you invest, a return of $10,000 is possible. Unlike pretty much any other investment services available, the Casey Research premium Alert services are focused on finding resource companies that have truly life-changing profit potential for early-stage investors.)

What opportunity
----I'm watching most closely now."

Alex Daley
Chief investment strategist, Casey Technology Division

"Technology has been through a lot more ups than downs over the past three years, and the result is a very inflated market for the biggest names and most visible companies.

Fortunately, as we've proven with big wins for readers, with smaller companies occupying new niches or chipping away at old ones with more efficient technology -- such as Amylin in diabetes management, Celsion in improved chemotherapy, Fortinet in network security -- you can find fantastic opportunities in places where the mainstream investment managers and brokers are not yet looking. By being even just a few months ahead of the curve, you can find great companies with game-changing technology that have yet to be discovered and understood for the value they are creating.

One of my favorite such small investments right now is in molecular testing – applying the work of the human genome project to better medical diagnostics. One company we are following is just now coming to market with the first of a series of new tests, this one for Down Syndrome (AKA trisomy 21). Unlike the current test, which requires taking a sample from amniotic fluid – a dangerous and painful procedure – this company's is a simple blood test for Mom. It can be done earlier, it costs far less, is many times safer, and results are available much faster.

The combination will win this company the majority share in the market, but also expand the test from one used only in extreme cases to a regular checkbox on the list of OB-GYNs across the country and the world. They have excellent patent protection, leaving the market wide open for them and protected for many years to come. And they have excellent peer-reviewed published data to support the quality of the tests that will make the sales process that much smoother."

What opportunity
----I'm watching most closely now."

Doug Casey
founder and chairman of Casey Research

"It's all about bubbles. The government helped create one in tech stocks that burst in 2000. Then one in real estate that burst in 2007. Now we're in a bond bubble, which is the biggest of all.

The next one will be in precious metals, with perhaps a super-bubble in mining stocks, which are close to their best values in history.

In agriculture, the best place to be is cattle – prices are low in real terms, despite the fact that herds are the same size they were 60 years ago when there were less than 3 billion people on the planet. Today the global population has risen to 7 billion, and the percentage of people who are wealthy enough to afford meat has grown exponentially."

Bud Conrad
Chief economist Casey Research

"Due to the interference of central banks working closely with their friends in the banks and large financial institutions, interest rates in most large developed economies are way below what sensible economic analysis would suggest.

Given our completely unsupported currency system, where no currency is redeemable for anything of specific value and central banks are ratcheting up the money printing to unprecedented levels, today's low interest rates – now at 50-year lows – ignore the risk of potential currency depreciation (inflation). The turnaround in interest rates – and they must head higher – will be the biggest financial event of the century and without question the most important investment opportunity for the decade ahead."

Dan Steinhart

"The shale-gas revolution is causing an interesting knock-on effect in the US chemical industry. Because natural gas has become so cheap compared to oil, chemical producers are abandoning oil as a feedstock in favor of natural gas. To make a long story short, this switch-up has altered the byproducts spit out from this process, creating a supply/demand imbalance for a chemical called propylene.

Most people outside of the chemical industry have never heard of propylene, but it's the second most-used chemical commodity in the world. It's found in paints, building materials, automotive parts, packaging, and a wide range of plastic products, to name a few. Demand for propylene is steadily growing, but because natural gas is so cheap, North American production is declining.

One company we have just begun following foresaw this situation and built a propylene plant to fill the production gap. This is the only such plant in North America, and because these plants take years to build, it will be the only one until at least 2015. Over the next two years, the company will enjoy a built-in market, virtually zero competition, and extremely favorable supply-demand dynamics. It's quite the window of opportunity, and if the company can execute as we expect it to, shareholders should profit handsomely."

What opportunity
----I'm watching most closely now."

Jeff Clark
Editor, BIG GOLD

"I'm most excited about gold and silver producers. Not only are they deeply undervalued, but this will be the first place the public goes when they want equity exposure to this industry. Just catching up to where they 'should' be – relative to where gold is trading – implies prices will eventually have to move much higher.

For example, one company's fair value, based on its Reserves and a $1,700 gold price, is in the neighborhood of $110 – but it's currently selling for about $37. Most producers show similar undervaluation.

Of course, there's no law that says that they have to reach these levels, but once precious metals resume their rally and investors remember the stocks of producing gold and silver companies, I think the catch-up opportunity for carefully selected stocks could be tremendous. Now is the time to begin buying, but with the caveat that not all precious metals producers are created equal. Buy the best and forget the rest."

What opportunity
----I'm watching most closely now."

Dennis Miller
Editor, Money Forever

"We recently screened thousands of companies to identify what are clearly undervalued dividend streams. We then evaluated the companies based on our Five-Point Balancing Test, a proprietary model that tells us if an investment is suitable for people in or near retirement.

The work we did led us to a major pharmaceutical company whose dividend has been consistently growing over the past five years. Second, the yield is a sizeable 3.8%. Third – and maybe most important in the current uncertain markets – it has a five-year beta of 0.17. That tells us that the stock has a mind of its own, separate from tensions in the market.

A beta of one means that a stock moves perfectly with the rest of the market. A beta of 0.17 means that if the market moved 10%, this company would – in theory – only drop 1.7%. With this extremely low beta, the company is way more defensive than most stocks out there. That's just the sort of company we think our dividend-seeking readers need to be paying attention to just now."

What opportunity
----I'm watching most closely now."

Adam Crawford

"We have just initiated coverage on a large technology manufacturing firm – a household name – with a forward P/E of just 4.24, an almost depression-level valuation.

The market's main concern with the company is that the PC, a major product line for the company, is headed for virtual extinction because of the advent of smartphones and tablets. You read about it all the time. Everyone is calling for the 'Death of the PC.'

But IDC, a tech research firm, estimates that global PC sales will actually increase in the next few years from just under 400 million units in 2012 to nearly 530 million units in 2016. Even if we adopt the market's bearish view on PCs and assume an immediate 50% decrease in PC revenues, all other things remaining equal, our evaluation tells us that the company's fundamentals still warrant a higher share price.

The company is currently trading for around $14, well below our target price of $24. So we have a well-known, global brand selling for a 41% discount – that's just the sort of company that gets our attention."