Tomorrow's Monster Stock?

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 by taking advantage of the market's weaknesses. These aren't penny stocks. They're viable companies with sound business prospects that are achieving phenomenal returns and happen to share some common traits: They're small, obscure, and ignored. Finding just one or two of these monstrously successful companies can help you establish a winning portfolio.

Stalking the monster
To find tomorrow's winners, we've enlisted the help of more than 140,000 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
Solid-state drive maker STEC has been burning up the charts as demand for enterprise-level SSDs soared. In its quarterly report, STEC said sales of its ZeusIOPS drive rocketed 375% to $57.7 million from the year-ago period -- up a whopping 125% from just the quarter before.

The ZeusIOPS drive is fueling that demand because it is an enterprise-ready, multi-level cell drive with capacity of up to 800 gigabytes, priced less than single-level cell drives that are currently in use. Analysts see the market for enterprise-level drives growing to 1.7 million units worth $1.1 billion by 2013.

CAPS member msrs2k points out STEC's SSDs are used by all the major enterprise storage vendors, with more likely to sign on soon, but it is the potential for down market growth that could have the biggest impact.

Currently STEC SSDs are mostly limited to the enterprise class storage arrays. I expect the market for SSDs to expand down into midsize business arrays (as all high-end array features do) greatly enlarging STEC's market opportunity.

STEC is ostensibly the market leader, but with that kind of scorching growth ahead, competitors want in. Start-ups like Pliant Technology are trying to nose in with a serial-attached SCSI interface that's said to be faster than STEC's Fiberchannel interface.

The real challenge, though, may come from Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), whose technology may actually delay the broader adoption of solid-state drives in the consumer market. Its Braidwood technology puts NAND flash on the motherboard,  making for faster read-write capabilities at a quarter of the cost of DRAM. In short, combining flash memory with hard-disk drives gives you the best of both worlds, and SSD-like capabilities at lower cost, but Intel tried that once before with its Turbo Memory and met with little success.

CAPS member GlazzHalfFool still says that STEC's "best in class products" gives it outsized growth potential.

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.