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 165,000 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.
Score is how many percentage points that pick is beating 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
It's easy to see why skeptics might not think Alvarion can go on to generate monster returns in the future. One of the biggest WiMax industry supporters, Clearwire, has opted to abandon the format and instead follow the 4G lead of AT&T (NYSE: T ) and Verizon. It will also build out a long-term evolution (LTE) network.
But that doesn't mean Alvarion is down for the count. Although the WiMax option looks to have lost the battle, it actually still has some pretty big tech names backing it, including Motorola (NYSE: MOT ) and Intel (Nasdaq: INTC ) . In fact, Intel believes WiMax is the better technology to meet the biggest driver for mobile data traffic, video, which analysts say will account for 64% of mobile bandwidth by 2013. Of course, history is littered with examples of the lesser technologies coming out ahead, such as VHS over Betamax, and some might say Blu-ray over HD-DVD.
Despite the hurdles, 97% of the CAPS members rating Alvarion think it will still go on to outperform the broad market averages. Give us your view on its prospects on the Alvarion CAPS page or in the comments section below.
A good reception
It seems ever since NetEase.com and Activision Blizzard (Nasdaq: ATVI ) took World of Warcraft beyond the reach of Gigamedia, the Chinese online gaming portal has been suffering a world of harm. Its stock is down 38% so far this year and is off 60% over the past 12 months.
Yet it has partnered with Blizzard to bring the much-hyped StarCraft 2 to Southeast Asia, and if the reception thus far is any indication, GigaMedia could have a major hit on its hands. According to Strategy Analytics, the MMORPG market will increase 60% in 2010 to $8 billion. The Chinese online gaming market alone was worth $3.9 billion last year, itself a 35% jump over the year before. StarCraft 2 sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first two days and is the best-selling strategy game in history and the best-selling PC game of the year so far.
The partnership with Blizzard was the reason CAPS member Skyshark29 felt GigaMedia was an undervalued stock: "Will distribute Activision-Blizzard's (ATVI) strongly anticipated StarCraft II in China. I suspect there to be strong sells on this title everywhere."
You're getting sleepy ...
Somaxon Pharmaceuticals has to overcome the problem that its target market for sleep aids is pretty crowded already with therapies, including medicines from Ambien, Sonata, Lunesta, and Rozerem. That hasn't kept the CAPS community from thinking it's going to heat up as more than 90% of those rating it mark it to outperform.
That could be because Somaxon's drug Silenor tackles insomnia from a slightly different angle. Its design to keep you asleep as opposed to getting you to fall asleep. Whether that's enough to differentiate it from the competition, remains to be seen, but mkg9859 Somaxon's already done the hard work and can now concentrate on coming up with its next success: "Hit it big by betting on a single product. Now they just need to sit back and let someone else sell it for them while making up new ones using all that extra cash ..."
A chance for scary growth
It takes more than a few All-Star picks and a quick pitch to make buy or sell decisions, so start your own research on these stocks on Motley Fool CAPS and find other opportunities with monster potential.
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