A Contrary Way to Find Your Next Big Winner
0.00%March 20 | MyPlanIQ portfolio symbol P_37233

As we continue to trawl for long term dividend payers that can be the core of a long term investment portfolio, Adam Wiederman of the Motley Fools looks into how you can find your next big winner. While I am cautious about finding a big winner, it's not a terrible idea to have some of your investments assigned to something that might turn out to be the next Apple -- although it can turn into the next no-name company that never did anything.

He mentioned eBay (EBAY), Amazon.com (AMZN), and Netflix (NFLX) as companies who created and then dominated their niches. Once that was done, they started expanding into adjacent niches, challenging the giants in a way that many didn't see coming. I remember hearing a presentation by Netflix CEO where he talked about not following the crowd because they are not always right.

This is all fine so far and I know that each of these companies have many fierce detractors but I am going to follow the line of thinking and look at his two selections of companies with this potential.

• The first, OpenTable (OPEN), has the potential to revolutionize aspects of the restaurant industry. It currently sells electronic reservation software to restaurants and has a growing online reservation-taking platform that syncs up to a restaurant's books.
• The second company, Rackspace Hosting (RAX), was an early pioneer in managed server hosting. Now, it's successfully added on to that by offering cloud hosting as well.

As I look at these two companies I have some hesitation.

OpenTable doesn't sell anything and is a free service to the public so it doesn't have the business experience to sell something directly to the public. I agree that there are many areas of expansion -- discount coupons, reservations for other types of businesses but I don't see a big, long term bang.

Rackspace Hosting will have their hands full competing with the likes of Amazon and Apple in cloud computing. There is the potential for them to expand and there is serious money in hosting -- I am not sure where they go from here -- but that's the trick.