Last year I had a very similar idea; identify the next Amazon/Apple/Google and invest ~5% of my portfolio in the company(s). I got things started by buying Apple & Tesla just before their respective splits. I double-downed on the EV band wagon and bought NIO, a Chinese EV maker and followed that up with an investment in QuantumScape, a company that is trying to build a solid state battery for the car market. I diversified with a pot stock, Tilray, and also dumped an amount equal to all of these equity plays into a VG energy sector fund mainly for its dividend. My final play was putting $20k into BTC this spring just before the price dropped like a rock. I should note that all of the money for my speculations came from cash-like investments that were earning next to nothing last year (and still would be.)
Overall, I picked more winners than losers, but my two big losses (QS & BTC) have taken a pretty big bite out of my total return. When I last ran the numbers, my speculation portfolio was trailing a 100% S&P investment by about 2 points. Not horrible, but it's cooled my enthusiasm for stock picking. Out of my choices, I think QuantumScape is the one that could deliver out-sized returns, but only if they can make the technology work and there's a lot of negative press on that. NIO has definitely been discovered already, but it might have more room to run than TSLA going forward? Another EV stock to keep an eye out for is Rivian. They're scheduled to start making deliveries of their truck & SUV next month, and have an order for 100,000 EV delivery vans from Amazon in their pocket. They haven't announced the date of their IPO yet.
What have I learned? Well, I need to figure out a "when should I sell and pay the taxes" number because several of my stocks had pretty big run ups before the bloom wore off the EV rose in March. I was holding at least two stocks that had more than doubled, but I didn't sell. Some of that was hoping that they will out-perform the market long term (TSLA), and some of it was simply not knowing what else I'd buy.