Most individual investors focus on the big name stocks or blue chip shares such as Amazon, Apple, IBM, GE, Tesla or Netflix.

However, in any given year, if you want to generate above average returns in your portfolio, it is unknown stocks like the following that can provide the boost.

The following twelve stocks are up over 500% in the last twelve months alone.  Do you own any?

QURE is up 515% in the last 12 months.

TRXC is up 537% in the last 12 months.

HEAR is up 639% in the last 12 months.

ENPH is up 661% in the last 12 months.

ARWR is up 666% in the last 12 months.

ECYT is up 725% in last 12 months.

EGAN is up 743% in last 12 months.

CERC is up 777% in the last 12 months.

VKTX is up 1,000% in the last 12 months.

CDNA is up 1,100% in the last 12 months.

MRTX is up 1,200% in last 12 months.

And last, but not least, MDGL is up 1,800% in the last twelve months!

Of course, it’s virtually impossible to know ahead of time that a stock will rise by this amount.  The only people who really are able to exploit the entirety of these moves are corporate officers and perhaps members of their family, and maybe a few institutional investors.

For individual investors, however, all we can hope to do is grab a piece of these moves.

If you’ve noticed, all of these stocks are quite volatile.  For example, TRXC traded up to $5.00 last Fall, then dropped all the way to below $1.50 by February.

We aren’t interested in holding a position through a down move like that.

Instead, we are looking to catch a chunk of a trend.  We’ll buy when a stock provides us with an appropriate buy signal, place a sell-stop order in case it reverses course, and exit the position with trailing stops if we are lucky enough to catch a trending move.

Over the course of a year, we hopefully can catch a few nice moves of 50% or more, while making sure that we don’t lose much of our capital on our losing trades.

By having the discipline to stick to a strategy like this, we should be able to significantly outperform the stock market over the long run.