I bet you thought this was the start of a late night infomercial about how I can make you rich, right? Not so much. :)

But what I like to do is look at recent leaders of the stock market, and see what stocks are "winning" - many times one can find new ideas that way. Some might call this momentum, some might call it relative strength - I call it trying to figure out what others love that I am missing and than having a list of new names to go investigate for possible inclusion into my portfolio. I usually use a much lower threshold than 75% return, i.e. 30% up in the past half year and then throw on many other variables such as positive earnings growth, positive earnings (period), revenue growth, trading volume, et al.

What I've done just for kicks is look up stocks that have returned 75% in the past 3 months, traded at least 300,000 shares on average, with a stock price of at least $10 (to weed out the penny stock junk - although with the huge move by Chinese small cap stocks this past quarter I had to put more variables on this search) and broke it out by market cap.

For today, I looked at companies with >$10 Billion market cap; these are companies that would be considered large cap or the very top end of "mid cap" stocks - this should be a tiny list since companies of that size rarely make such massive moves. Even Google (GOOG) "only" made 41% last quarter. This returned 6 names, 5 of which I am very familiar with and the 6th which generated a new trading idea on themes I like; but a company I never heard of. By market cap:

1. PetroChina (PTR) - $456B: +85%
   
2. China Mobile (CHL) - $397B: +81%
3. CNOOC (CEO) - $90B: +82%
4. Mosaic (MOS) - $31B: +76%
5. Mechel (MTL) - $11.6B: +105%
6. Sunpower (SPWR) - $10.3B: +84%

Quite a list, the top 3 are large cap Chinese companies - the top 2 of which are mind blowing gains in market capitalization ($200 billion or the size of Google for the top 2 names in 90 days) - I've ranted on PetroChina here (as it stands perched to become the largest company - on paper - in the world), Mosaic has and continues to be a top holding in the fund and Sunpower is one of the US solar companies I found far too expensive to buy but it only continues to go up. So this brought up the mysterious Mechel (MTL). Running over to Yahoo Finance I find a Russian company that "through its subsidiaries, operates as a mining and steel company.