Great Call on Dendreon! What's Next?

Investors in our Motley Fool CAPS community have given Dendreon's (Nasdaq: DNDN) stock two stars out of a possible five. The high-flying biotech behind the recently approved cancer vaccine Provenge has collected 293 underperform ratings to go along with its 1,222 outperforms on CAPS.

Low rating notwithstanding, many CAPS members have scored big by betting on Dendreon's stock. But few have done as well as All-Star cubaislibre, who nabbed more than 1,000 points by giving Dendreon's stock a thumbs-up back at the beginning of 2009, and hanging on ever since.

Overall, this astute stock picker has managed 60% stock-picking accuracy while racking up more than 6,000 points, and Dendreon isn't this player's only great call. Here are several other prescient picks:

Source: CAPS.

What may jump out about these picks is that they were all added in January 2009. Thanks to raging fear brought on by the financial crisis, that was a great time to be buying stocks, though very few investors were able to muster the courage to do any buying. cubaislibre obviously was able to look beyond the headlines, and this member's CAPS portfolio has most certainly been rewarded for that.

Though these three stocks have already posted big gains, they've all been kept as open picks. Both Cliffs and Titanium Metals could be considered calls on the broader global economy, though Titanium Metals has also been getting an extra boost recently from the aerospace industry. Baidu, meanwhile, is a key online player in China that many investors seem to believe will spew ever-more profits as China's economic growth continues.

But what's caught this investor's eye lately? Here are a few of cubaislibre's most recent CAPS calls:

Source: CAPS.

Looking at cubaislibre's top performers, it's clear this is a stock picker who likes to live on the edge. We had one biopharma company picked before its first drug approval, a Chinese Internet company, and two materials companies picked right in the midst of the worst recession in decades.

Then there's Somaxon, a tiny biopharma company that's riding a single drug -- an insomnia treatment approved earlier this year. Meanwhile, MEMC and Solarfun are both involved in the solar power industry; Solarfun primarily on the finished products side and MEMC on the raw materials side.

To a stodgy dividend investor like me, these seem like wild, risky stocks to load up on. However, cubaislibre has shown a penchant for not only picking the right stocks, but also picking them at the right times.

What do you think about these stocks? Head over to CAPS and share your thoughts with the 165,000 other members of our community. It's completely free.

Yes, Virginia, individual investors who buy stocks do exist.