The Globe and Mail attempts to identify stocks that climb more in an advancing market than they fall in a declining market in its Wednesday, Oct. 22, edition. The Globe's Michael Bowman writes in the Number Cruncher column that he only looked at companies with a market capitalization greater than $1-billion. Mr. Bowman considered five-year bear and bull sensitivities of a stock's performance to the negative or positive changes in the benchmark, in this case the S&P/TSX composite index. Return on equity (ROE) measures a corporation's profitability by revealing how much profit a company generates with the money shareholders have invested. Companies had to have an ROE greater than 5 per cent to be included in Mr. Bowman's recommended list. Stocks that show upside in a volatile market are Canadian National Railway, Brookfield Asset Management, Agrium, ARC Resources, Silver Wheaton, Vermilion Energy and Cameco. Over the past five years Canadian National Railway gained 1.1 per cent when the index was up 1 per cent, and only fell 0.8 per cent when the index was down 1 per cent.