Fevertree – 100 Bagger Stocks

Update, October 2026: I wrote this article several years ago, when Fevertree shares traded at around £20. They have since fallen sharply, to about £8.70 on 13 October 2026 (Stockopedia), a drop of more than 55% from my purchase price. Higher glass and transport costs squeezed margins, and growth slowed. In 2025, brewer Molson Coors bought a stake in the company. It’s a useful reminder of the main lesson of this article: very few shares become 100-baggers, and holding through long periods of losses is hard.

This article is my personal view and not a recommendation to buy any share. When investing, your capital is at risk. Past performance doesn’t guarantee future returns.

What is a 100-bagger?

One of the most eye-opening books I’ve read is 100 Baggers by Chris Mayer. It’s about shares that returned 100 to 1, so every £10,000 invested became £1 million. It’s a great read and well worth your time.

What surprised me most was that most of the shares in the study weren’t speculative. There weren’t as many biotech, junior mining or oil exploration companies as I’d expected. The median starting market value was about $500 million, hardly a speculative tiddler.

Mayer lists 365 US shares that achieved a 100-fold return between 1962 and 2014. Many were household names: American Express, Boeing, Caterpillar, Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, Disney, FedEx, JPMorgan Chase, Kellogg, PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s, Monster Beverage and Nike.

365 sounds like a lot. But the list covers more than 50 years and many thousands of companies that came and went. It only includes the winners, not the far larger number of companies that went nowhere or went bust. Picking a 100-bagger in advance is much harder than the list suggests.

So why didn’t more investors make 100 times their money in these well-known companies?

Lesson one: hold your winners

When you find a great company, be ready to hold it for a long time.

People sell their winners too soon. A share doubles and they’re tempted to take the profit, without asking whether the company can keep growing. If you sell after a 60% gain, you’ve done well, but now you have to find another winner.

In Mayer’s study, the average 100-bagger took 26 years to get there. That’s about 19% a year. A company compounding at 50% a year takes about 11 years to rise 100-fold. At a more realistic 10% a year, it takes about 48 years.

100-baggers in the UK

Building on Mayer’s work, Nick Train studied the FTSE 350 companies that had risen 100-fold since 1980. He found 12 out of the 350, close to 3%.

Those 12 were Ashtead, Antofagasta, Cairn Energy, Capita, Daejan Holdings, DCC, Domino’s Pizza, JD Sports, Next, Randgold Resources, Sage and Tullow Oil.

Another 12 had risen 50 to 100 times: BTG, CLS, Clarksons, Cranswick, Dechra Pharmaceuticals, Diploma, Grainger, Rotork, Paddy Power, St Modwen, Savills and Sirius Minerals.

A further 65 companies rose 20 to 50 times, and 82 more rose at least 10 times. In total, 171 companies, nearly half of the FTSE 350 at the time, had risen at least 10-fold at some point.

These lists also show how much can change. Since Train’s study, several of these companies have been taken over, including Randgold (merged with Barrick in 2019), BTG (bought by Boston Scientific in 2019) and Daejan (taken private in 2019). Others have fallen sharply. Sirius Minerals ran into funding problems and was bought by Anglo American in 2020 for a fraction of its former value, and Capita’s shares have lost most of their value since their peak. A 100-bagger can give back much of its gain.

What do 100-baggers have in common?

I won’t give away all of Mayer’s findings, as that wouldn’t be fair to the author. But these traits stood out:

Start small: smaller companies can grow earnings quickly by winning a modest share of their market. The median starting sales of companies in Mayer’s study was $170 million. You want to find acorns that grow into oak trees.

High returns on capital: Charlie Munger said: “Over the long term, it’s hard for a stock to earn a much better return than the business which underlies it earns. If the business earns 6% on capital over 40 years and you hold it for that 40 years, you’re not going to make much different than a 6% return.” Look for companies that can keep reinvesting at high rates of return.

Don’t sell early: the average 100-bagger took 26 years.

Reasonable valuations: buying at a low multiple of earnings and then watching earnings grow boosts returns, because the market often rewards consistent growth with a higher multiple. Low multiples are preferred, but don’t be afraid to pay a little more for quality.

Owner-operators: founders and managers with large shareholdings tend to act in long-term shareholders’ interests. Check how many shares insiders own.

Growth: almost all of the 100-baggers were much bigger businesses at the end than at the start. A company needs room to grow to make the most of high returns on capital.

A hundred-bagger of the future?

When I wrote this, one share I thought could join the list was Fevertree. It had already risen more than 10 times since its 2014 listing, from £1.34 to about £22, and I thought it had a long runway ahead.

It seemed to tick most of the boxes: high returns on capital, still run by its founders, a relatively small market value and plenty of room to grow. The big concern was valuation: it traded at close to 40 times earnings.

That seems to go against Mayer’s preference for low valuations. But Mayer isn’t rigid. He says you need to balance the price against the quality and growth of the business. Sometimes even 50 times earnings is a bargain.

The high valuation explained why the share price had stalled for a year, despite double-digit growth. But a 100-bagger doesn’t need to rise every year. In Mayer’s examples, Bank of New York went sideways from 1976 to 1981 during its 100-fold run, Texas Industries from 1980 to 1985 and American Express from 1985 to 1992. Berkshire Hathaway was no higher in 2005 than at its 1998 peak.

I believed Fevertree was in one of these flat periods. Some people I knew who bought at the listing had sold, locking in a 10-fold gain. I thought they might be giving up a further 90-fold. So I bought shares at a little over £20.

I was prepared to wait while earnings caught up with the valuation. As the update at the top shows, that hasn’t worked out so far. Earnings growth stalled and the share price fell rather than moving sideways. That’s the risk with high valuations: if growth disappoints, the share can fall a long way before it looks cheap.

Disclaimer: This article reflects the author’s personal opinion and holdings. It is not a recommendation to buy or sell any share. The value of investments can go down as well as up.