Tomorrow's Monster Stocks

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.

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
When the falling market was mostly just about the sorry state of financial stocks -- whether it was because Citigroup had assumed too much risk or Bank of America overextended itself buying Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch -- it was easy to flee to the safer havens of stalwart companies like Procter & Gamble and McDonald's.

However, as this recession continues to grind markets down, even bellwether stocks like Wal-Mart Stores have been unable to maintain the strength they initially exhibited. So the fact that we saw more cyclical companies, like heavy industry players Caterpillar and United Technologies also wither on the vine, wasn't altogether surprising. But maybe this fear is being carried a bit too far, resembling more of a panicked rout than a thoughtful consideration of future business prospects. Some investors take a look at what's happened to Cat's share price, for example, and they see opportunity.

kstoltz is a new member of the CAPS community and understood the stock dropping into the low $30's because it had diminished growth opportunities. As economic expansion was retarded those businesses building it up would be pressured. But the heavy-equipment maker also implemented a tough cost-cutting plan, and while this year will indeed be a tough one, this member feels the Cat's claws are still sharp. It has more than $1.5 billion in the bank, an amount sufficient to cover the dividend that's currently yielding more than 6% annually. Run, if you think construction is dead for years, but kstoltz says such thoughts are only driven by fear.

Rabidly, pointlessly oversold at this point. Plenty of cash to cover the dividend, and this is before it began job cuts and retrenching for what will be admittedly a difficult year. However, this has been news for several months now. The drop down from the $40s to the low $30s made sense given the lower prospects, but now it's being priced on fear: as if construction will not return for years.

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.