Tomorrow's Monster Stocks?

• Email
• Share
• Print

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 over the past decade. These aren't penny stocks; they're viable companies with sound business prospects, achieving phenomenal returns every year. 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'll enlist the more than 125,000 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.

Player	CAPS Member Rating	Monster Stock	CAPS Score	Recent Stock Pick	CAPS Rating (5 stars max.)
tenmiles	100.00	Synthesis Energy Systems	138.98	Landec (Nasdaq: LNDC)	*****
BravoBevo	99.99	Aegon	237.77	Human Genome Sciences (Nasdaq: HGSI)	***
StatsGeek	99.99	Force Protection	196.45	XL Capital (NYSE: XL)	*
Uberchota	98.30	Alpha Natural Resources (NYSE: ANR)	619.69	Garmin (Nasdaq: GRMN)	***
MTBB	97.39	Helmerich & Payne (NYSE: HP)	118.29	Noble (NYSE: NE)	*****

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
As the financial markets have suffered a crisis of confidence over the past year, insurers like XL Capital find themselves under pressure to maintain solid capital positions or risk ratings downgrades. That could result in a loss of business for the insurer while raising its costs at the same time. XL got hit with a downgrade last month and it's exploring a possible sale of the company in turn. Yet CAPS member checklist34 figures that the insurer remains solvent enough  that it could be a big winner for investors.

This type of radical drop on stock price almost implies a strong chance of bankruptcy. However, a look at XL's financial condition gives grounds for hope. The company is extremely solvent, with $7b in cash and $3b in debt. Debt to equity is 0.36, price to book is 0.16, expectations are for profitability next year and a forward p/e of 1.XX is projected. They may miss that, and the stock may not soar immediately, but between the extremely, extremely low valuation, projected profitability, and apparently solid financial condition this stock seems like a given for considerable appreciation.

Sounding the depths of Loch Ness
GPS-maker Garmin is under the gun these days, facing the prospect of its once industry-leading technology being co-opted by others and making it a marginal player. Cell phones, for example, offer sufficiently usable GPS technology that will only improve with time, but raise the possibility of making Garmin-dedicated devices obsolete and the stock hated. Although it wants to respond to the threat with the Nuvifone, delays have only exacerbated the problems.

CAPS member rocksnot thinks it's only a matter of time before the cell phone's ubiquity makes a GPS device a relic: "becoming obsolete to spend a few hundred bucks on a GPS when your iPhone (and others in the future) will do the same thing for free."

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.

Beginning Jan. 12, 2009, Fool co-founder David Gardner, Jeff Fischer, and their Motley Fool Pro team will accept new subscribers to their real-money portfolio service. Motley Fool Pro is investing $1 million of the Fool's own money in long and short positions in a range of securities, including common stocks, put and call options, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). They also incorporate proprietary CAPS "community intelligence" data into their research. To learn more about Motley Fool Pro and to receive a private invitation to join, simply enter your email address in the box below.