This is What A Future Winner Looks Like
Eight stocks. One pattern. Here's what they have in common. What makes a winner.
I started following Nebius in January 2025. Its stock is up ~750% since my first write-up, ~220% since my second write-up and ~95% since my last note. There were plenty of opportunities to generate massive returns on this stock over the last year and a half. Many entry points, while fundamentals only grew stronger.
This is what a winner looks like. This is what we buy, hold and accumulate, and do so as long as it keeps winning.
The million-dollar question is how to find them? If it were easy, everyone would be rich so it obviously isn’t, but many winners share the same characteristics, meet the same criteria. That’s what we’ll talk about today.
The Winners’ Trinity
Most winners share three key characteristics.
A positive narrative within an accelerating sector, with clear catalysts.
Improving financials with a path to even more improvements.
A growing buying volume on the stock.
Lots of companies meet these criteria at one point in time. But only a few can hold them through months or years, with constant improvements and demand. Those are the ones we look for and even if some will fail - maybe most, every winner starts with those three criteria. So this has to be our starting point, filtering comes later.
So, what about Nebius? Well, it of course met the three criteria - and it still does.
First, narrative. If we were to remember the environment in early 2025, the narrative was to buy as many GPUs as possible to train the best model. Nvidia was king, LLMs were only starting to be real, with no commercial usage yet nor a clear idea of what could be done with them. AI equaled Nvidia.
DeepSeek came and showed the world that training wasn’t only a matter of GPUs, but also a matter of infrastructure and optimization. This changed the perception of the market around two things.
Nvidia’s GPUs are necessary, but not self-sufficient.
Open-source LLMs will be a thing to boost optimization.
The third key development was usage; we’d need a bit more time to confirm this but it seemed evident that AI was here to stay and would generate ROI to those using it, which meant a growing demand for inference - an unknown beast yet. The thesis was clear, it would be bigger than training.
This is the environment in which Nebius arrived, with an understanding other players didn’t have yet. Their core business wasn’t GPUs, but optimized compute. They built vertically integrated infrastructure for training/inference, optimized for open-source models. It seems obvious today, but it wasn’t early 2025. Their focus was on quality and cost-competitiveness.
This is what set Nebius apart. This, and their financial position.
Second, financials. Nebius got “lucky”. Being an entity of a Russian company forced to be dissolved, they started with a head-start in the form of an extremely efficient and running data center in Finland, and ~$3B in cash plus other business and equities - ClickHouse, Avride, TripleTen…
As their focus was optimized compute, it meant cost-competitiveness. Management focused on cheap energy, racks, hardware... Everything built within Nebius was and still is optimized for cost, which allowed them to be competitive, attract, and grow faster than competition with a control on their margins.
Strong balance sheet, potential for growth acceleration, control on margins, within an accelerating narrative and demand at the start of inference.
Lastly, stock demand. This might have been what lost many investors on Nebius as they didn't understand that the ticker used to be the Yandex ticker, and only became Nebius post split, late 2024. The chart would look disgusting without knowing this.
From this moment, volume has constantly accelerated with stable prices as those who knew bought. I buy on supports, and found Nebius early 2025, so my first purchases were in the mid $30s, while my big purchases were in the low $20s during the April tariff flash-crash.
If you know me, you know I only buy uptrends, stocks above their W50 but again, this chart includes Yandex which means its averages are including previous price action, which has nothing to do with Nebius. I bought the low of the range on a company with an extremely strong narrative, strong financials, with growing volume. The perfect purchase would have been on the $50 breakout assuming we were to follow my rules, and that would have been enough to yield massive returns.
What Then?
Then, nothing. When you find a winner, you hold, occasionally trim, buy on retests, and wait. The hardest in investing is always watching your money compound without doing anything. There is a playbook for this.
The stock gave you two extensions the last year and a half, and two retests. This was when you trimmed, and bought back, with the third extension being given right now.
The hardest is holding as you fear for your profits shrinking.
So far, my system returned 816% on Nebius.
This was how to identify Nebius, early. It met the holy trinity then, and held it since. It wasn’t the only one the last two years, nor the last one as we will see later. Here are other examples I participated in, while you could find many, many more.
Palantir.
Narrative - Artificial Intelligence started to be used with the most obvious use case: to help companies optimize their operations. Palantir’s AIP was released in April 2023 and meets this exact need, focused on governmental contracts and expanding into commercials.
Financials - Strong Balance sheet with ~$4B of net cash, improving operating margins, reaching profitability and a clear path to cash generation acceleration as demand for AIP was rapidly accelerating at higher margins.
Stock demand - The first post-AIP earnings set the story and stock demand exploded, with a massive breakout on volume. This is where the buy happened, at breakout or in the weeks after during the horizontal stabilization, constantly confirmed by earnings.
The rest is history, with four large extensions meant to trim, three clear W50 retests and ~1,200% returns over the 18 following months, at the top. I detailed the entire ride and how to optimize returns with a clear system on my selling playbook.
That system returned 815% on Palantir in 18 months.
Hims & Hers.
Narrative - GLP-1 pills are the new miracle pills and a telehealth company is setting up compounding to meet the current shortage, meeting FDA requirements. Their product is a perfect market fit but their application is also optimized for consumption, ease and discretion.
Financials - Flat balance sheet but rapidly improving margins and cash generation as usage of their platform increases in term of users and spending - pushed by GLP-1 pills. The potential is as strong as the demand and the shortage length.
Stock demand - Without surprises, the stock anticipated and broke out late 2023, with volume increasing after the May announcement. Volume looks small in the screenshot as it compares to what came after, but it was huge early 2024 compared to previous volume: buying pressure was crystal clear.
The $14 retest offered a perfect trinity setup. Narrative was strong, growing; financials were healthy and improving and stock demand was accelerating. One clear trimming signal at the top, two other retests to increase the position, and an obvious close to me ~$62 as the narrative broke.
My system returned 353% on Hims in ~12 months.
As I said, there were many more out there over the past years, especially with AI. But we shouldn’t try to catch them all. Our job as stock pickers is to catch a few of them, hopefully the best ones, with large sizes. Those three names were enough to generate wealth as long as taken with big sizes. You didn’t need other trades to make a killing.
Running towards all new shiny objects doesn’t accomplish anything.
My sole job with this Substack is to identify this trinity, to share them from the core narrative to their financial, including stock demand. To play them and to return as much as I can with a crystal clear system, from stock picking to buying and selling.
Today, I own six positions that meet that trinity.
