The Best-performing Stocks for the Past Ten Years

29 stocks went up more than 1000% in the past decade. One of them is an airline. I guess going to Hawaii has been really popular. Seven of the top ten performers are Internet stocks. The other three are biotech companies. It was the decade of Internet and drugs.

What do all of the above stocks have in common, other than being able to grow their earnings and sales in an impressive manner? They spend a lot of time on the 52-week highs list and set up multiple times.

The U.S. stock market indexes bottomed on March 9th, 2009. A couple days later, two stocks broke out to new all-time highs. Both of them went up more than 10x after their breakouts. One was Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which was acquired in 2015. The other one was Netflix. Netflix went up 44X in the past decade and today it is a 62-billion dollar company. In 2000, Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for $50 million, because “it was a very small niche business”.

How to Turn 5k into 30 Million

Home Depot (HD) closed at all-time highs today. $5000 invested in Home Depot when it went public in 1981 is worth about $30 million today.

Turning 5k into 30 million for 35 years means that HD compounded at an average annual rate of 28%.

28% annual appreciation for 35 years is very, very rare. To compare to some of the best-performing stocks of all time: 5k invested in Microsoft in 1986 is worth about $4.85 million today. 5k invested in Walmart in 1975 is worth about 29 million today. 5k invested in Applied Materials (AMAT) in 1975 is worth about 22 million today.

Finding a stock that has the potential to compound at 28% annually for 35 years is close to impossible and probably, it won’t be repeated ever again. Holding such a stock for 35 years might be even harder.

What if instead of finding a stock that can compound annually at 28% for 35 years, you find a stock that can go up 28% this year? And then you repeat the exercise every year for 35 years, one stock at a time? It won’t be easy, but it is also a lot more manageable. Compounding can be magical.

1562 stocks went up more than 30% in the past 12 months. 334 went up more than 100% for the same period.

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Two Themes Have Defined Trading In Early 2017

The major stock market indexes continue to consolidate mostly through time. Small caps are underperforming large caps, which has made chasing breakouts challenging in many occasions. We haven’t seen any strong buying pressure so far in 2017. There has been a little uptick in selling pressure, but nothing major.

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Two major trading themes have defined 2017 so far. I don’t know if this will continue to be the case in the near future:

  1. Weak U.S. Dollar, strong emerging markets. The U.S. Dollar is down 2% year-to-date. For the same period, emerging markets (EEM) are up 5.5%, Brazil (EWZ) is up 13%, China (FXI) is up 5%, gold (GLD) is up 5.6%, gold miners (GDX) are up 14%.
  2. Large-cap tech stocks are significantly outperforming. The Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) is up 4% while Russell 2000 (IWM) is down 1% year-to-date.

We have just entered a new earnings season. Thousands of companies will provide new information about the state of their business. As a result, we will see the formation of many new trends, both up and down trends. New trends mean new opportunities.

Check out my latest book: Top 10 Trading Setups – How to find them, when to trade them, how to make money with them.

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