We’d all like to experience it… Those massive 100+% gains just a handful of stocks experience. Obviously, looking back at it would be too easy to say, “if only.” The problem though is not missing the opportunity, but not allowing ourselves the chance to properly find these winners.
Some of the best non-microcaps, over the last 5 years, include companies such as Southwestern Energy (SWN), Apple (APPL), and Intuitive Surgical (ISRG). While most of these seem like relatively easy stocks to find “pre-pop,” chances are most of us didn’t.
In today’s economic condition, it may seem like an easy tasks to find a 3 digit gainer. Just look at what AIG did over a few weeks. An easier way is to look at companies with foreign exposure.
Over the last 5 years, there were just 23 successful domestic 100+% gainers; however, if we include foreign companies that number spikes to over 100.
… so look for a domestic companies’ foreign counterparts.
While the U.S. is recovering from some rough economic times, the idea of easily picking big shot winners is definitely more of a crap shoot than before. Rather, now we should find those companies with extensive business on foreign reach.
A good example of this is the popular Chinese search provider Baidu (BIDU). We already know the success Google (GOOG) had, so based on that it seems reasonably easy to have predicted the great moves by Baidu. There was really no point of sticking with Google because their growth potential was just not that of something like Baidu was at the time.
The idea is to use a current domestic company’s history and see if you can correlate that with the future of a foreign company.
I’m sure there is an another way, but I recommend just looking under the “Related Companies” section on Google Finance, and find companies with foreign business.
Remember that countries like China and India still have a long way to grow and greater possiblility of massive leaps. That means more ability for stocks to grow faster and higher.
Sure there are risks when dealing with foreign factors, but its an interesting concept. The simple key to bagging these huge gainers is to not limit yourself to U.S. based stocks.
While you are looking for foreign companies, many of them still trade on U.S. markets. For those other stocks, check out E*TRADE foreign market trading capabilities.