My First 8 Bagger

The traditional investment advice is that you should steer clear of "penny stocks," those low-priced, speculative securities of small companies. However, like most investors, I have dabbled in my fair share of them over the years, hoping to get lucky at least once.

Earlier this year I came across a company called Air Transport Services Group, Inc. (ATSG) that was trading at $0.25 per share at the time. ATSG through its subsidiaries, provides air cargo transportation and related services in the United States. It offers package handling and other cargo related services; airlift services to other airlines, freight forwarders, and the U.S. military; freight transportation and supply chain management services; passenger transportation primarily to the U.S. military; and package sorting and handling services.

I use an online stock broker called Share Builder, which offers trades for as low as $4 per transaction. The primary drawback is that they only place buy orders on Tuesdays. One of the major benefits is that you can purchase partial shares (you can select to invest a dollar amount rather than a certain number of shares).

Anyways, I am a pretty small time investor, so I threw $25 at this company. To date, I have earned a 800.46% return on my investment. That makes this my first 8 bagger! My annualized gain is an unrealistic 11,419.02%! The toughest thing now is deciding how long to hold on. On The Motley Fool, the stock is ranked as a CAPS 4 star and more than 90% of the users there believe that it will continue outperform the market. I guess the final question I have is when I get filthy rich from this $25 investment (I am obviously joking), who should I hire as my accountant and tax attorney?!

Here's to hoping that ATSG continues its meteoric rise!