Tomorrow's Monster Stock?

Stocks climbing to 10 times their original price are rare breeds -- but they're not impossible to find. Especially when you have Fools for friends.

The market's best stocks include companies that have risen dozens of times in value by taking advantage of the market's weaknesses. These aren't penny stocks; they're viable companies with sound business prospects that are achieving phenomenal returns. Finding just one or two of these monstrously successful firms can help you establish a winning portfolio.

Stalking the monster
To find tomorrow's winners, we've enlisted the help of more than 145,000 monster trackers at Motley Fool CAPS. We've compiled a list of the most successful CAPS members, dubbed All-Stars, whose picks have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled in price. Then we've plucked out some of their recent picks for stocks they find equally promising.

*The number of percentage points by which that call has outperformed the S&P 500.

Of course, this is not a list of stocks to buy -- or, for those monster stocks that our CAPS All-Stars have already found, sell. Just consider them starting points for your own further research of extreme buying opportunities.

In search of Bigfoot
Even Warren Buffett thinks his "Baby Berks" become "the tail that wags the dog" now that Berkshire Hathaway has completed its B-class 50-1 stock split.

There was a 30:1 price ratio built into the two classes of Berkshire stock. Historically, if the Class B shares got too expensive relative to the Class A's, arbitrageurs would buy up the latter and convert them into the former. The conversion process only works in one direction; you can't convert B shares into A shares, so it typically held volatility in check. And with the price of a single B share running into the thousands of dollars, there wasn't much trading going on one way or the other anyway.

All that's changed now. While the price differential was upped to 1500:1, the Baby Berks now trade at less than $100, and they're bound to be a more liquid investment. That's going to increase volatility, particularly if Berkshire Hathaway becomes a component of the S&P 500, which many believe is now possible. You'll have mutual and index funds forced to buy the stock, undoubtedly causing shares to jump, but you'll also be faced with a declining number of A shares if traders try to capture any arbitrage value between the two classes and convert more and more A shares into B's. Buffett now says it will take only a 1% discount in the price, compared to the 2% level previously at work, for there to be a value in that strategy.

The stock split has investors agreeing that Berkshire's stock will be an even better value now that it's priced for the masses. CAPS member galefb says there should be a large influx of new investors that ought to lead to it growing in value:

I think the investing public assigns to Warren Buffett studied, wise, conservative perspective. That will play well in the current environment. Investors don't know his sophisticated analyses behind the scenes, they just know he seems to understand investing. So, the fact that the stock has now become a two-digit, instead of three-digit stock, the 'little guy' will be able to be a Berkshire Hathaway investor and will give Warren more leaway in performance in exchange for the panache of being within the fold...and even able to attend the touted annual meeting. What better theater!

With Buffett still at the helm, it's not surprising the CAPS community has an outsized view of its outperformance potential. More than 98% of the nearly 5,000 members who have rated it are bullish on the stock. Head over to the Berkshire Hathaway CAPS page and coo over the Baby Berks, too.

A chance for scary growth
It takes more than a few All-Star picks and a quick paragraph to make buy or sell decisions, so start your own research on these stocks on Motley Fool CAPS. You can read a company's financial reports, scrutinize key data and charts, and examine the comments your fellow investors have made all from a stock's CAPS page. And while you're there, weigh in with your own thoughts on whether you think these are tomorrow's monster stocks.