In 1952, Texas oil magnate Alfred Glassell Jr. visited Cabo Blanco, a small fishing village in the northwestern corner of Peru. A previous trip to Bermuda hooked him on big-game fishing, and marine scientists tipped him off that the equatorial currents off the coast of Peru might offer even better opportunities.
So, on April 7, Glassell boarded his lobster boat off the coast of Cabo Blanco…
And caught the first recorded fish weighing over 1,000 pounds.
If the story ended there, we would probably chalk that feat to luck. After all, nature has a habit of producing outliers, including albino rhinos, 60-year-old horses, and a 24,000-pound elephant named Henry whose remains were donated to the Smithsonian for safekeeping.
Alfred Gassell’s 1,026-pound black marlin could have been a one-off.
But Cabo Blanco continued to produce. Over the following 16 years, the fishing site produced over 30 “granders,” including 24 world records and a 1,560-pound black marlin that measured 174 inches in length, pictured below.
Even Ernest Hemingway caught a 700-pound marlin there in 1956 while filming the motion picture based on his novel The Old Man and the Sea.
It turns out that Cabo Blanco sits in an oceanographic “sweet spot,” where a cold, nutrient-rich current meets warm equatorial waters. These unusual factors produced enormous amounts of food for plankton blooms, sustaining an abnormally large food chain.
Apex predators, such as black marlin and swordfish, could grow with nearly no constraints.
A similar process exists for finding stock “granders” – reasonably established companies that rise 1,000% or more. And much like big-game fish, these types of firms tend to cluster in certain places.
Once you find these special locations, it becomes much more common to reel in these big winners.
Over the past three decades, I have refined the process of identifying the investment “sweet spots” that produce these 10X winners, including…
And now, for the first time, I have translated my internal locating system into a computerized, quantitative set of rules… a system that I now use to find these potential 1,000% winners.
Think of it as a fishing radar… or distilling decades of oceanographic science into five simple “10X Factors.”
It’s a powerful new stock-picking system designed to pinpoint precisely when a stock enters the 10X pattern. Then I work with it – man + machine – to make my final recommendations.
Today, I’d like to give you a sense of what to expect from my system…
And share one of its first five “official” recommendations.
The Secret to 1,000% Returns
One of the core tenets of my new system is a pattern I call “down a lot, up a little.”
This is where prices of a well-established company fall sharply for reasons beyond its control (down a lot)… and then begin a modest recovery (up a little).
When used in conjunction with three other essential “10X factors,” my new system unearths stocks at bargain-basement prices while avoiding “false dawn” moments where falling shares keep going down.
One notable example of this is Humana, a health insurance firm I recommended back in 2000 after prices had fallen by two-thirds. The company was hit with a perfect storm of Medicare reimbursement challenges from the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 and a terminated merger with United Health Group.
These events proved temporary, and shares of Humana rebounded threefold over the next several years.
Investors were given another chance to buy in during the depths of the 2007-’08 financial crisis.
At the time, Wall Street considered every insurance firm “uninvestable.” Dozens of these companies had written policies on bonds and mortgage-backed securities, and those toxic assets were now blowing up blue-chip insurers.
Ambac… Lincoln National… AIG. No one knew which company would go under next because most insurance and reinsurance firms were not required to disclose what they owned.
But Humana was a special case. Unlike other insurance companies, health insurers renegotiate insurance policies annually. That means Humana’s assets during the financial crisis were surprisingly short-term to match its short-term liabilities.
In fact, Humana’s assets in 2007 had a duration of just 2.6 years – well below the 7.0 years typically seen at other insurers.
Even better, almost all of Humana’s assets were categorized as available for sale, which meant they were also stated at fair market value. This made Humana’s balance sheet seem worse than it was (allowing investors to get in for cheaper), while paradoxically making it less likely for the insurer to blow up.
And so, when the time came for Humana to recover, it did so with force: up 100% after a year… 250% after two years… 300% after four…
By the time 2014 had rolled around, Humana shares had returned a stunning 3,591% from my original investment.
A New Humana in the Making
In one of my paid services, I’m now seeing a similar setup in a company that lost 70% of its value between 2022 and 2024 after a global crash in fertilizer prices.
High fertilizer costs triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused many farmers to reduce consumption, creating a cascading effect up the supply chain.
As shown in the graph below, the producer price index for fertilizer manufacturers fell hard in the following year.
Prices are now recovering. Since 2024, overall producer prices in the U.S. fertilizer manufacturing industry have risen 10%. They now sit 40% higher than their 20-year average, and analysts expect more gains to come. A shortage in China is growing particularly severe.
Investors should sense an opportunity. A fertilizer I recommend to my paid members continues to trade below its 20-year average, as shown in the graph below.
This is precisely what a the “down a lot, up a little” pattern that my new system searches for looks like – a massive selloff of a high-quality company followed by the beginnings of a recovery.
Meanwhile, this company remains one of the lowest-cost fertilizer producers in the industry, thanks to its vertical integration, and closures of higher-cost sites, and tariff-resistant production sites in the U.S. South.
Of course, its upside is more modest than Humana’s 3,591% gain. We might expect a 100% gain, given its milder 2022 selloff. (This would make it more like Hemingway’s 700-pound catch.)
But this shows how even a humble fertilizer producer can trade at prices well below its fair value… and how this “down a lot, up a little” method of finding 1,000% winners can apply to 100%, 200%, and 500% gainers as well.
Many investors go their entire lives without ever finding a 1,000% winner. Many don’t even try after hearing about the risks surrounding small-cap stocks and/or sky-high valuations.
If you count yourself among those “many,” let me point out two key facts about my new system…
The Importance of 10X Winners
The first is that many of its picks are household names. According to the 5.2 million backtests my team put together, Apogee would have picked out Nvidia Corp.’s (NVDA) 1,871% run… Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) 4,285% surge… and others like them.
And it mirrors perfectly the type of stocks that I often favor. These are established firms trading on the Nasdaq and NYSE exchanges… not exotic bets on three-person startups.
The second is that these picks are stable enough that you can feel safe investing a reasonable amount of capital. These aren’t the $50 wagers on microcaps that people brag about at the golf course.
Together, that means the stocks my system and I work together to recommend are the type of investments where even a single winner can reasonably turn a $2 million nest egg into $4 million… or a $10 million investment portfolio into a $20 million one.
You only need to invest 10% of a portfolio into a company that rises 10X to roughly double your money.
I’m unveiling that system for the first time ever at my 10X Breakthrough broadcast on September 10, at 10 a.m. ET. You can reserve your spot for that free event by going here.
During that broadcast, I’ll show how I use those five 10X Factors to spot potential big long-term winners in advance. And how the system and I work together – man + machine – to make my final stock picks.
As promised above, I can reveal one of the system’s first five “official” recommendations now.
It’s Five Below Inc. (FIVE), a discount retailer based in Philadelphia. The stock entered the 10X Zone on May 12. It’s moving fast, though, and the time to strike is now.
I’ll reveal four more of the system’s original recommendations… including their names, ticker symbols, and “10X Dates” – exactly when they flashed “Buy” in my new system – during my 10X Breakthrough event.
Finally, I’ll demonstrate the system in real time. You’ll watch it sort through a universe of 14,000 stocks… and pinpoint the very, very few with 10X potential.
Reserve your spot for that September 10 free event now – and I’ll see you there.
Regards,
Eric Fry
Senior Investment Analyst, InvestorPlace
