Bill Ackman had a Black Swan trade with General Growth Properties

Steve Jobs investment in Pixar returned 220x

http://www.gurufocus.com/news/315903/steve-jobs-investment-thats-returned-220x--and-its-not-apple

ABC/Capital Cities is a past Black Swan Stock

A shareholder who bought in when Capital Cities went public in the late 1950s would have made a 2000-to-1 return when sold to Disney in 1995.  The story is told in one of the chapters in The Outsiders by William Thorndike.

Volkswagen Short Squeeze

For a brief period, Volkswagen was technically the most valuable company on the planet.

http://priceonomics.com/porsche-the-hedge-fund-that-also-made-cars/

Small Oil Company With Enormous Oil Discovery

When I write about how a small oil company like Linc Energy, HRT Participacoes, Serica Energy, or Corridor Resources has the potential to make crazy multiples on your money, people are skeptical and have asked me for a precedent of a small public traded oil company having an enormous discovery.  Below I provide the example of CIE.

Cobalt International Energy (CIE)

14-Dec-2011
closing price = $9.01
market cap = $3.533 billion
total enterprise value = $1.918 billion

hope/rumors of a huge find caused the stock to creep up

Friday, 10-Feb-2012
closing price = $23.98

After the close Cobalt announced that the Cameia-1 well had found a 1,180 foot "gross continuous oil column." that greatly exceeded expectations.  Expectations were ~1 billion barrels.

Monday, 13-Feb-2012
CIE promptly opened at $33.98


Almost 10 billion dollars of wealth was generated for shareholders in a couple of months by one discovery.

Takeaway - If a company makes an oil discovery believed to be worth billions of dollars, then the share price will rapidly increase to reflect the newly found value.

Hillary Rodham Performed a Black Swan Trade in Cattle Futures

Initial investment of $1000 generated nearly $100,000 in ten months!

One model estimated the odds were at least 1 in 31 trillion!

Link to Wikipedia article below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy

Ultra Petroleum is a past example of a Black Swan Stock

Between the year 2000 and 2008, Ultra Petroleum went from $0.20 cent a share to a split adjusted $200 a share equating to a 1000 multiple gain of your investment in eight years.

General Growth Properties - 100x over 5 years

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/bill-ackman-on-herbalife-fannie-air-products-LfJk3cWuQSyBnWXb5Ttfqg.html

At the 16:30 minute mark Ackman states that the company went from $0.34 to over $34 if you include all the component parts.

Ackman also states that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the most interesting investment since General Growth.

Ethanex Energy

http://seekingalpha.com/article/2121413-the-most-interesting-investment-in-the-world-ethanex-energy

Example of a black swan stock

Pharmacyclics - 100x in last 5 years

Greatest Black Swan Stock in History?

http://www.georgenichols.com/publishedwritings/xla/

excerpt from above George Nichols link:
My work on this stock--thanks to the resulting controversy--may be the most memorable of my achievements.
In 1999, an obscure Cayman-Islands based realty firm refashioned itself into Xcelera.com, a dot-com holding company. The stock immediately skyrocketed--to a peak value near $12 billion (in Mar. '00).
The magnitude of this runup is truly staggering, and perhaps unparalleled. In articles such as NY Observer journalist Christopher Byron wrote [boldface added] "...Xcelera’s stock price soared from 30 cents per share to $223 per share--which is to say, rose by more than 74,000 percent in value--which is, I would suspect, the "greatest one-year rise of any exchange-listed stock in the history of Wall Street."¹
To illustrate, a lucky shareholder with an initial $100 investment would have seen that amount quickly balloon to $74,000!
Commentary from analysts and writers (including a Microsoft MoneyCentral journalist owning shares) helped propel this mania. This also came amidst a market fervor for all things dot-com, partly fueled by investment banks routinely recommending lousy stocks (in order to boost banking revenue).
However, I challenged popular sentiment by arguing the stock was dangerously overhyped, as detailed in this 3-page stock analyst report and 1-page newswire.
I was promptly deluged with hate emails, nearly 100 of them, many from frenzied daytraders seeking quick riches (as opposed to investors with a long-term view). This was documented in "Stock Rage"--a feature story in Individual Investor Magazine--as well as a goofy hate mail wall I created.

Post-Mortem

The company quietly disappeared after the stock was delisted in 2004.

---

Footnote
1. My trailing-year calculations indicate a return of "only" around 65,735%, but Byron notes elsewhere that his approximate 74,000% figure refers to a trailing 15-month return. Either figure is dramatically higher than a typical stock's long-term annual returns of 10%-12%. See also Byron's article "How C.E.O. Alex Vic Sucked $400 Million by Selling Xcelera."