“What Kind of Easter Egg Hunt Are You In?” Part I

In honor of Easter Weekend, today, we kick off a two-part series by Senior Market Analyst Brian Hunt with one of the most jaw-dropping “what-if” investment stories ever told.

Imagine turning $5,000 into $2.87 million – and that’s not a typo…

The early days of Netflix offer a gripping glimpse into what happens when the world laughs off a visionary idea. But this isn’t just a tale of Blockbuster’s blunder, it’s a launchpad into a hidden truth about markets that few investors truly understand.

In the essay below by Brian, we dive into why the biggest fortunes aren’t made with the largest stocks – and how to find the kind of opportunities everyone else is too proud, slow, or uninformed to notice.

Ready to rethink where you’re hunting for the big winners?

Here’s Brian with Part I of “What Kind of Easter Egg Hunt Are You In?”

Have a good evening,

Jeff Remsburg

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In the spring of 2000, a man named Reed Hastings traveled to Dallas with a big business idea.

Hastings approached the management of movie rental giant Blockbuster with a proposal. He wanted Blockbuster to buy his small business for $50 million.

At the time, Hastings’ company – called Netflix – had a promising business model. It allowed people to rent movies through the mail. Netflix was also small and struggling to turn a profit.

Hastings believed a Blockbuster purchase of Netflix would be a win-win deal for both parties. Blockbuster’s managers did not. They didn’t think Netflix’s business model made sense for them. A Netflix executive later said that Blockbuster essentially laughed Hastings out of the room.

You probably know the rest of the story.

Netflix secured investment from other sources and built a hugely popular mail-order DVD rental business.

Around 2007, it made a brilliant move and began transitioning into America’s No. 1 movie and television streaming service. This innovation crushed traditional brick-and-mortar rental companies like Blockbuster.

In 2002, Netflix had less than 3 million subscribers. By 2022, it had reached 222 million subscribers and climbed to a market valuation of $129 billion.

Blockbuster’s market valuation in 2018?

Zip.

It went bankrupt a long time ago… and its “pass” on Netflix is widely regarded as one of the worst decisions in modern corporate history.

To give you an idea of how an investor would have done with an early Netflix stake, consider that Netflix stock fell to a split-adjusted low of $0.35 per share in 2002.

Assume you did not buy the bottom, but instead invested $5,000 at $0.50 per share, picking up 10,000 shares of Netflix.

In 2022, that $5,000 investment would have been worth $2.87 million… a 574-fold return.

Netflix’s story is one of my favorite examples of one of the most powerful concepts in the world of finance and investing.

The concept?

If you want to make giant returns in stocks, you must be in the right Easter egg hunt.

Below, I explain why…

How to Find Stocks That Can Return 100-Fold Hide

On Wall Street, companies are often grouped and labeled according to their size.

Investors typically place a company in one of three size categories: large-caps, mid-caps, and small-caps.

“Cap” is short for “market capitalization.” This is the term used to describe the value of a public company. To figure out a company’s market cap, all you have to do is multiply the total number of shares the company has in the market times the market price of a single share.

The group names are common sense. Large-caps are large. Small-caps are small. Mid-caps are in between.

For example, the popular software company Microsoft is a large-cap. In November 2022, its market cap was around $1.79 trillion.

Or, take iPhone maker Apple. It’s also a large-cap. In November 2022, its market cap was around $2.4 trillion .

Mid-caps are smaller than large-caps. Typically, investors consider companies with market caps in between $2 billion and $10 billion to be mid-caps.

The difference between a large-cap and a mid-cap can be huge. A mid-cap company worth $5 billion is less than 0.2% of the size of giant Microsoft.

Finally, we have small-caps.

These are companies with market caps under $2 billion.

While the difference between a mid-cap and a large-cap can be huge, the difference between a small-cap and a large-cap can be incredible.

For example, take a small-cap with a market value of $500 million.

This is just 10% of a mid-cap with a market value of $5 billon… which means it is less than one tenth of one percent the size of a large-cap like Microsoft.

Large-caps can be good investments. They are typically stable, established, profitable companies. They often pay dividends. Large-caps can be great investments for conservative investors.

But if you’re interested in making 10, 20, or even 50 times your money (or 574 times your money like with Netflix) in a single investment, you’d be smart to look at small-cap stocks.

Small-cap companies have much greater potential to produce giant returns for their shareholders in a short time than any other kind of company.

The reason is simple…

It’s much, much easier for a young, $500 million small-cap to grow 10-fold than it is for a mature $500-billion giant to grow 10-fold.

That’s just basic math.

If your daughter sold 10 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies around the neighborhood on her own, you could probably help grow her results 10-times (selling 100 boxes) by driving her around, putting a little pressure on your friends, neighbors, and coworkers to buy some boxes.

But what if your daughter was a natural saleswoman and had sold 100 boxes on her own?

To enjoy 10-times growth under that scenario, she’d have to sell 1,000 boxes. Not so easy anymore. That’s the mathematical challenge behind enjoying giant growth when a company is already doing giant sales.

Or, think about these situations…

• When a small $300 million market-cap beverage company creates a hit product that generates an additional $1 billion in sales, it’s a huge deal that can make the company’s stock rise by hundreds or thousands of percent.

However, if beverage giant Coca-Cola creates a way to generate an additional $1 billion in sales, it barely registers on its massive income statement.

• When a small $200 million restaurant company with 40 locations expands to 200 more locations, its market value can soar. But if mega-chain Starbucks adds 200 new locations to its already massive 14,000+ locations, it’s a blip on the company’s balance sheet.
• When a small $600 million software company creates an amazing new way to collect, manage, and analyze healthcare data, financial data, or marketing data, it can increase revenue by over $1 billion… and its stock can soar 10-fold.

However, if giant Microsoft adds $1 billion to its $100 billion+ annual revenue, it’s a drop in the bucket that won’t even make the news.

Now, all this DOES NOT mean a large company is automatically a bad investment. It just means that it’s not an ideal investment for someone looking to make big returns in a relatively short period of time.

Remember, a $500 million small-cap is just one-tenth of one percent of a $500 billion large-cap.

That’s why a search for stocks with huge growth potential should start in the small-cap stock world.

This is where companies with the potential to grow 10, 20, 50… even 574 times larger live and hide out.

But it gets even better for small-cap investors.

There’s another tremendous benefit they enjoy that large-cap investors do not.

I believe this benefit is best explained with the story of an Easter egg hunt.

The Story of the Easter Egg Hunt

Picture this…

It’s Easter and you’re ready for the neighborhood Easter egg hunt.

Over 100 eggs have been hidden in a small local park. Each egg has a treat inside it. You’re told that one special egg even has a cash prize in it.

If you’re in this hunt, which of the two following scenarios would you rather be in?

1. In addition to you hunting for eggs in the park, there are 1,000 other people hunting for eggs. It’s a madhouse.
2. In addition to you hunting for eggs in the park, there are just 10 other people hunting for eggs.

If you’re like most reasonable people, you picked B.

You’d rather have this:

Than this:

You’d rather have just 10 people in competition with you… instead of 1,000 other people picking over the park like a swarm of locusts.

What does this have to do with investing?

Well, this same dynamic is at work in the stock market every day.

The financial markets are where millions of people go to pick through opportunities in stocks, commodities, currencies, options, bonds, and real estate.

In this big market, everyone is looking to buy assets for less than what they are worth and looking to sell assets for more than what they are worth.

Essentially, everyone is trying to outsmart everyone else.

Everyone is looking for eggs.

The financial markets price most assets correctly most of the time.

However, it’s not a perfect system. Windows of opportunity – where you can buy assets for less than what they are worth or sell assets for more than what they are worth – appear from time to time.

In the investing world, these windows are called “market inefficiencies.”

These are the opportunities that can make us big money.

However, the more people that are studying, monitoring, and picking over a market and its opportunities, the more competition you have in that market… and the less likely you’ll be able to find market inefficiencies.

The more people picking over a market, the smaller its pricing inefficiencies will be and the shorter its windows of opportunities will be open.

In the financial markets, the biggest competitors are “institutional investors.”

Institutional investors are the elephants of the financial markets. This group includes mutual funds, pension funds, large hedge funds, and insurance funds. It also includes sovereign wealth funds, which manage the savings of entire nations.

A single large institutional investor can manage over $10 billion in assets.

So, even a wealthy individual with $5 million in assets is a mouse compared to this elephant (in this case, the elephant is 2,000 times larger).

Some institutional investors manage much more than $10 billion.

The sovereign wealth fund of Norway – which has been fattened by oil revenue for years – was worth more than $1 trillion in 2017.

This is 100 times bigger than the large institution with $10 billion to invest.

The large institutional investors of the world have ridiculously giant amounts of money to invest in stocks, bonds, and other assets.

These large institutional investors typically employ armies of analysts who spend hundreds of thousands of hours every year scouring the world for opportunities.

These analysts perform a lot of old fashioned “financial detective” work by visiting public companies and interviewing industry experts.

They also use the world’s most advanced computer algorithms and “Big Data” analytical programs to comb through market data.

The programs run 24 hours a day, seven days a week… sifting all of the world’s financial data a thousand different ways at warp speed… hunting for pricing inefficiencies, small and large.

Picture those Easter egg hunts again… and realize that the stock market is a brutally competitive Easter egg hunt.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is the financial market is a big, diverse place.

And there are Easter egg hunts the big guys can’t participate in.

We’ll leave it here today, and pick back up tomorrow.

Regards,

Brian Hunt
Senior Analyst, InvestorPlace

P.S. – Want help in this “Easter Egg Hunt”?

Perhaps artificial intelligence can help.

For years, Wall Street has experimented with using AI to help target the most lucrative investments on the market. But in the past few years, they’ve gone “all in.” Now, they’re spending hundreds of millions to develop this technology. 

For everyday investors far from Wall Street, that’s where TradeSmith’s breakthrough AI algorithm – called An-E – comes in. It can forecast the share price on thousands of stocks, funds, and ETFs one month into the future.  

On Wednesday, TradeSmith CEO Keith Kaplan covered the full details behind this remarkable new system and demonstrated how you can apply it to your investment strategy.

If you missed it, you can catch a free replay of Keith’s AI Predictive Power Event right here.