Could You Actually Own a 100x Stock? (2024)

Over the last 20 years, how many stocks do you think have 100x’d?

27

But some of these are still very low quality, speculative companies so I added additional filters of 10 year revenue growth > 1% per year and 10 year diluted EPS growth of over 1% per year.

With those very simple filters, we’re down to 12 companies that have 100x’d over the last 20 years.

All of the data and visuals in this post are from YCharts. For this post I used the Stock Screener, Time Series Analysis, Fundamental Charts, and Scenario Builder.

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Here they are.

Now let’s take a look at the stocks from the first list and see what their market caps were in 2003 at the beginning of their 100x journey to glory.

On the chart below, I’m showing the market cap at the end of each year starting with 2003 on the right through 2008 on the left.

Two things should stand out.

#1 Only 3 stocks had a 2003 market cap above $1B with the largest being Apple at $7.8B.

Most stocks that go on to return 100x start as microcaps.

#2 In normal markets, the opportunity to earn a 100x return is pretty short. Most of these stocks had doubled or tripled in just 3 years from the start date.

For an oversimplified example, if a $1B market cap company doubles to $2B, you now need it to become a $200B market cap company instead of a $100B market cap company to earn 100x.

But there’s also a third thing. Holding a stock long enough to earn 100x is extremely hard to do.

Here’s a chart of Apple since 2003. You can easily see one 50% drawdown and at least four 30% drawdowns.

If that doesn’t seem bad, imagine investing $10,000 into Apple in 2003, seeing it grow to $500,000 just to watch it drop by $150,000 (more than 15x your initial investment).

Apple is probably one of the tamer 100x rides.

Owning a 100x stock is really, really hard. You have to find it, invest in it, and then the hardest part is you have to hold it AFTER you could lock in life-changing returns by selling.

Expel Inc (XPEL) returned an astounding 62,160% from 2004 through October 27, 2023 when I pulled this data.

Here’s a scenario showing someone investing $100/month into Expel over it’s 15 year 100x+ journey.

In total, the investor would have contributed $18,200 and it’s current value would be $6.3M. At one point it had grown to over $12M…. Insane.

But just think about that. The investor could have invested $500k - $1M into stocks that literally went to $0 and still be up over $5M.

That’s the power and potential of microcap investing.

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All of the data and visuals in this post are from YCharts. For this post I used the Stock Screener, Time Series Analysis, Fundamental Charts, and Scenario Builder.