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
Although Bank of America and CEO Ken Lewis are feeling the heat from the toxic acquisition of Merrill Lynch, it may be Lewis' other hasty acquisition, Countywide Financial, that burns investors more. One analyst suggests Bank of America may suffer more losses from Countywide mortgages than it has set aside as reserve for its entire mortgage portfolio: $33 billion for Countrywide versus a total reserve of $23 billion.

Behind the U.S. government, Bank of America is now one of the largest mortgage lenders in the nation because of the Countrywide acquisition, which actually gives some investors hope. CAPS member osc707 thinks that once the economy gets past the current turmoil, Bank of America will prosper because of its mortgage holdings: "This is a company that is now the largest mortgage holder in America. Once we get through these housing problems and government bailouts, we shall see BofA come up once again."

Sounding the depths of Loch Ness
It would make sense that as Apple has branched out from its computing roots into music and movie downloads, a logical next step would be into our living rooms: Apple-branded TVs! One analyst thinks the deal it made with LG Display last month means Apple will soon be putting its feet up on your coffee table as it truly becomes part of your iLife. The agreement was a five-year deal to supply LCD panels to Apple, which even LG admitted that for $500 million, was a "massive amount" of LCD displays.

While not predicting an Apple-branded TV, CAPS member crescentrv pointed out that Apple has moved so far beyond just computing that further enmeshing itself in consumer electronics and entertainment is a plausible extension.

[Apple] is just a completely diff co today from what it was. What started as an alt-PC company is now iTunes, iPod, iPhone. How long before they do this to video as well with iVideo? And on the PC side, they REALLY compete now with the Wintel monopoly by allowing me to run the Windows stuff on their hardware. When younger people want to buy a computer, what do they want? APPLE products all the way. So [Apple] is the future.

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.