Buying a discounted stock is more than just about the discount itself. It's also about the timing. If you buy a stock as it's going down, you may lose the opportunity to buy it at the rock-bottom price.

If you buy it at the rock-bottom price and the stock languishes or fluctuates around it for weeks, it will cost you time and stretch your profitability timeline (uncomfortably) long. However, you may get optimal results if you buy just after the stock starts its recovery journey.

This is why it's a good idea to keep track of discounted stocks and buy at the right time to maximize your return potential.

A steel company

Despite being one of the world's ten largest iron ore producers, Canada's steel industry is relatively modest. Stelco (TSX:STLC) is one of the major players in this industry and has an impressive history — over 100 years of operations on Canadian soil (with a few exceptions). It started in 1910, declared bankruptcy in 2007, and joined the market as a publicly traded company in 2016.

The company produces different types of steel and steel products, though hot-rolled steel dominates its output. The output volume and financials have been relatively steady in the last few years.

Until the stock jumped almost 74% in three days when an offer was made for the company, it was quite heavily discounted. Now, it's worth tracking if you believe it's still trading below its intrinsic value or buying if you want to lock in the current 3% yield before it falls below this mark.

A fuel cell company

Whether you are looking at it purely from an ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing perspective or wish to invest in a technology that has explosive growth potential once the right market conditions are there, Ballard Power Systems (TSX:BLDP) is a good pick.

The company is built around one technology/product — i.e., fuel cells. These cells use hydrogen as a fuel source. They can be used to power vehicles, making it a "zero emissions" technology parallel to electric vehicles (EVs), albeit without all the batteries and secondary emissions tied to them (battery metal mining).

This makes it a far greener technology compared to EVs, but it has yet to gain as much traction because hydrogen is expensive to produce and difficult to store and transmit.

Once these "obstacles" are gone and hydrogen becomes a price-competitive and safe fuel source, companies like Ballard might explode. This possibility makes the current 93% discount the stock is trading at (from its five-year peak) highly attractive.

An e-commerce company

Lightspeed Commerce (TSX:LSPD) is one of the two Canadian e-commerce giants. Its primary focus was Point of Sale (PoS) systems for small- to medium-sized enterprises, though it has now expanded its range to include several e-commerce products and features as well.

In its early days, Lightspeed was expected to become an exceptionally powerful growth stock akin to the other e-commerce giants in the country. For a while, it delivered on that promise.

Between its inception and the 2021 peak (less than three years), the stock rose by over 700%, but it has dropped hard since then. The fall was more than just a correction. It was also augmented by a short-seller report that identified several discrepancies in the company's reporting.

Foolish takeaway

Stelco has exited the list of discounted stock thanks to its recent climb but itâs still going up. Lightspeedâs performance is radically different from other tech stocks, and Ballard requires the right market conditions to turn things around. These are reasons enough to keep an eye on these stocks.

The post 3 Discounted Stocks to Track in July 2024 appeared first on The Motley Fool Canada.