An article on bargains that value investors in Canada are currently looking at:  Canfor, Torstar, Jean Coutu, Yellow Pages Income Fund, Pfizer, UnitedHealth Group, ProEx Energy, and Brookfield Properties.

When markets were going straight up a few years ago, value investors like Wade Burton had a tough time finding any bargain-priced stocks.

"We spent five years banging our heads against the wall," says the portfolio manager with Mackenzie Cundill Investment Management.

But when the credit crunch hit last summer, everything changed. Now, there are cheap stocks everywhere. "It's awesome," Mr. Burton says.

Value investors look at measures such as price-to-earnings and price-to-book ratios to find stocks that are trading at bargain prices. A key premise of value investing is that markets often overreact to negative news, pushing stocks below their true worth. The idea is to buy the stocks when nobody else wants them, so you can profit when the market comes back to its senses.

Sound simple? It isn't. Buying stocks others are ditching requires a strong contrarian streak and loads of patience while you wait for the price to recover. Sometimes it takes years; sometimes it never happens.