3 Traits That Can Lead to Explosive Stock Growth

Multibaggers -- or stocks that increase multiple times their original investment -- are something of a holy grail among investors. These explosive growth stocks can be elusive and difficult to identify. That said, there are several common traits investors can use to thin out the pack and help identify these potential multi-baggers.

In this episode of Fool Live that aired on Oct. 30, "The Wrap" host Jason Hall and Fool.com contributor Danny Vena discuss some of these traits and how Fastly (FSLY -3.35%) has the potential to produce market-beating gains.

Jason Hall: Danny Vena, what do you got? I would like to hear your mindset, and this is the one I really want you to answer because I know you see a lot of great ideas out there. How do you prioritize what to buy?

Danny Vena: One of the things that I do, and really, this applies to me as an investor not only when things are on sale but all of the time, I'm always looking for big overriding trends like you've talked about earlier. I'm looking for the big secular tailwinds. I have go-to examples that I use all the time. E-commerce is up and coming, streaming video is up and coming, digital payments, all of these are things that have already started, that they were already seeing rapid adoption. But since the pandemic have gotten a boost, same thing with telehealth and telemedicine. First, I look for the big overriding trends.

Then I'm looking for a company that has got a really big total addressable market. Sometimes, you have to dig a little bit to find those. But whenever they do these investor conferences or they make an acquisition, you can find out what the company believes its total addressable market is. Now, a lot of times, that's going to have a little bit of management bias in it. So you can take it with a little bit of a grain of salt, but it gives you an idea of what management is shooting for.

Then also, I'm looking for a company that is really doing things differently, somebody that has solved an old problem in a new way. When you take those things together, you have the potential for explosive growth. You're looking at companies that could potentially be, like David Gardner describes, the multibaggers.

A lot of the Rule Breaker-y type of stocks out there, the one that I most recently bought, so I can talk to that is Fastly. We talked about that a couple of hours ago. Fastly is a company that has taken a little different path to edge computing and content delivery networks (CDN). If you are out there in the business world and you've got your internet up there, and thousands or millions of people are coming to your site and it's getting bogged down because there's so much traffic, you're losing the respect of your customers or potential future customers.

Fastly helps solve that problem by making sure that people get fast response times on your website. Fastly has lost, I think the last time I knew it was like 55 percent, it might be more than that now, of their value just in the last month because of losing some of TikTok's business. I don't think that's a deal breaker. It represented about 11 percent of their revenue in the most recent quarter. I think they're going to backfill a lot of that. I think if you come back and we talk about Fastly in three months or six months or even a year's time, you're going to see that this was a really great buying opportunity for that stock.

Hall: I tend to agree, I really do. I think it's just a breakdown between understanding the business and thinking about the potential that it offers, that's solid stuff. Always good stuff from you.