CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) — Fortune magazine earlier this month identified Apple as the most admired company in America. Investors may want to sell.

You read that right: Companies that are as popular as Apple AAPL, -3.17% often have difficulty living up to investors’ expectations.

This certainly has been the case over the past year: The stock of the most admired company in last year’s Fortune ranking (which, like this year, also was Apple) is 16% lower today than then, according to FactSet. The S&P 500 SPX, -1.11% , meanwhile, is down 3%.

Baidu's self-driving cars to get U.S. test run

That’s a steep price to pay for investing in admiration.

Though admired companies don’t always lag behind the market, they do more often than not. In fact, they often end up trailing the companies that are least admired.

Consider a study conducted several years ago by two finance professors: Deniz Anginer at Virginia Tech and Meir Statman at Santa Clara University. The researchers constructed two portfolios out of the stocks on Fortune’s annual list. The first contained the stocks of companies that were most admired companies, while the second contained those with the lowest Fortune scores — those most despised, in other words.

Between April 1983 and December 2007, the Despised Company portfolio outperformed the Admired Portfolio by nearly 2 percentage points a year, on average. Perhaps even more revealing, the professors found that increases in admiration were, on average, followed by lower returns.

Accordingly, a shrewd contrarian would invest in companies that are most despised.

Fortune doesn’t actually publish the list of companies that are least admired, which I’m sure lets their lawyers breathe a bit more easily. But 24/7 Wall Street has filled in that void, earlier this year publishing a list of “America’s Most-Hated Companies.”

To be sure, you shouldn’t automatically invest in a company just because it’s hated. Sometimes it is despised for good reason.

For the following list, I took the 10 stocks at the top of 24/7’s most-hated list and eliminated those that were not recommended by at least five of the investment advisers I monitor. Four stocks survived these dual criteria, which is listed below in descending order of the number of recommendations received from the monitored advisers:

* Wal-Mart WMT, -1.02%

* Comcast Class A CMCSA, -0.70%

* Bank of America BAC, -0.55%

* Spirit Airlines SAVE, -2.21%

Click here for more information about the Hulbert Sentiment Indexes.