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Finding the next great stock, before the crowd rushes in
In the late 1970s, people would stand for hours outside New York’s Studio 54 hoping to get in.
The club’s co-founder, Steve Rubell, became famous for turning people away. On one Saturday night, he boasted of rejecting 1,400 would-be guests.
Ironically, the long lines to get in were part of the club’s appeal. Every person waiting in line became evidence that whatever was happening inside must be worth experiencing. The crowd became the advertisement.
Human beings are motivated to action by all sorts of forces, but few are more powerful than our tendency to take cues from other people. Psychologists call this social proof. And investors fall for the same phenomenon every day.
You see examples of it everywhere in your life. If everyone is lining up outside a restaurant, you’ll assume the food must be good.
Credit: Liukov
If a book spends months at the top of the bestseller list, you’ll assume that it must be worth reading.
And if millions of investors are piling into the same handful of stocks, it’s only natural to assume those stocks are where the money will be made.
So many people can’t be wrong… right? You wouldn’t want to miss out… right?
Well, sometimes the crowd can be wrong, or at least they can be late.
One of the key insights we’ve repeated often in the Digest is that the human brain is a marvelous tool for creating art, music, language, and engineering feats, but it can be a terrible tool for investing.
The truth is that following the crowd may be one of the most expensive habits an investor can have, and one they need to control.
Of course, human beings evolved to take comfort in numbers. For most of history, blending into the group was a survival skill. If everyone in the village fled toward higher ground, you didn’t stop to debate whether the floodwaters were really coming. You just ran.
But the stock market isn’t a survival exercise.
The market saves its biggest rewards for anticipation, not confirmation.
By the time everyone agrees a company is a winner, the biggest gains are often already in the rearview mirror. Investors who bought Nvidia in 2024 were not making the same investment as the people who bought it in 2016. Investors who discovered Amazon after it became a household name weren’t taking advantage of the same opportunity as those who found it years earlier.
Yet our brains keep pushing us toward what’s already popular, already proven, and already widely accepted.
That’s why investors routinely crowd into yesterday’s biggest winners while overlooking tomorrow’s.
And that tendency may be more dangerous today than ever.
Because while millions of investors remain fixated on the same AI giants dominating today’s headlines, a new generation of potential market leaders may already be emerging beneath the surface.
Spotting Winners Before the Crowd Does
Finding a great company isn’t the biggest problem investors have. It’s finding a great company before everyone else does.
Few investors needed to be convinced Nvidia (NVDA) was a great company in 2025.
The challenge was recognizing it in early 2023, before the stock became the poster child for the AI megatrend.
According to investing legend Marc Chaikin, that’s exactly when his Power Gauge turned bullish on Nvidia. The stock would go on to become one of the greatest wealth-creation stories in modern market history.
If you’re not familiar with Marc, he spent nearly six decades on Wall Street, building trading systems, analyzing stocks, and managing money through bull markets, bear markets, crashes, bubbles, and recoveries.
Today, he’s best known as the creator of the Power Gauge, a stock-rating system designed to help investors identify strong stocks and avoid weak ones.
Here is how NVDA performed since it turned bullish in Marc’s Power Gauge, and more importantly, before the crowd had piled into the stock.
Winners that go up more than 10X don’t come along every day.
Even after nearly 60 years on Wall Street, investors still follow Marc due to his ability to identify major market trends before they become consensus.
Of course, the issue for investors isn’t whether they should have bought Nvidia three and a half years ago.
The question is where to find the stocks in today’s market that resemble Nvidia before that move began.
Marc’s New Breakthrough
Spotting Nvidia before the crowd is one thing.
Finding the next Nvidia before the crowd is something else entirely.
Most people know where the big gains have already been made. They know Nvidia. They know Meta. They know Palantir.
What they don’t know is which stocks could be next.
According to Marc, that’s exactly the problem he’s been trying to solve.
While too many investors spend their time chasing yesterday’s winners, Marc believes the biggest fortunes of the next decade will be made in companies most people have never heard of… yet.
Companies that share many of the same characteristics the market’s biggest winners displayed before they became household names.
That’s why Marc recently unveiled what he calls the most important breakthrough of his career.
It’s a new AI-powered system designed to search through decades of stock market history and identify companies whose technical and fundamental profiles closely resemble some of the greatest stock market winners of all time.
In other words, instead of asking, “What should I buy after it’s already gone up?”
Marc is asking a very different question:
“What stocks today look most like Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, and other legendary winners before their biggest moves ever began?”
And the answers may surprise you.
In an upcoming event, Marc will describe his new system and which stocks most closely resemble Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon before their biggest moves.
And why he believes the market is entering a period where a new generation of winners could replace many of today’s household names.
As a bonus, you can get free, early access to a special “beta” version of this first-ever AI-powered platform from Chaikin Analytics. A unique chance to take Marc’s system out for a “test-drive.”
Don’t waste your time following the crowd. at 10 a.m. ET, so you can unlock the potential gains the stock market has in store.
Enjoy your weekend,
Luis Hernandez
Editor in Chief, InvestorPlace
