Tomorrow's Monster Stocks?

Stocks that climb 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 130,000 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
The Internet and our living room entertainment centers continue to inch ever closer to each other. Adobe recently announced plans to join forces with entertainment and computing powerhouses to bring its Flash player to televisions. The move should provide more seamless delivery of high-def movies, streaming video, and Flash-based video games. Switching quickly from television programming to online content will further integrate the computer into our lives. (I can't wait for pop-up ads during a movie!)

Such partnerships on Adobe's part may help combat the softness seen in its recent quarterly earnings report. Sales tumbled 13%, even though earnings held the line through a series of sharp cost-cutting maneuvers. While Adobe derives the bulk of its revenue from its Creative Suite software, getting Flash-enabled TVs and set-top boxes onto the market later this year could provide a nice boost to its top line, considering that 80% of all online videos run on the Flash platform.

Microsoft's Silverlight software had some observers convinced that Adobe was running scared, as Mr. Softy's tech powered high-profile broadcasts of the Olympics and NCAA basketball tournaments. Investors doubtlessly wonder whether Adobe's Flash deals will allow it to steal some of Microsoft's growing thunder in online video.

As CAPS member dudemonkey points out, Adobe's competitive moat for Flash is as wide as it is unique:

If you work in the creative industry, you probably use Adobe software. Photoshop is the industry standard application for graphical creation and modification and the open source competition is not as feature-rich as Adobe's offering. Adobe owns Flash, which has long been the best platform for delivering rich web user interfaces to users ... Moats in the tech industry are difficult to come by and don't last long, but Adobe's got one and it's not expensive.

A chance for scary growth
It takes more than a few All-Star picks and a quick paragraph to make buy or sell decisions on a stock. Start your own research on these candidates on Motley Fool CAPS, where 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. While you're there, weigh in with your own thoughts on whether you think these are tomorrow's monster stocks.