Regarding "the 10 stocks with the biggest gains over the past 100 years," I think it's another kind of thinking trap. It ignores "the concentration of returns" or "time asymmetry."

In the past 10 years, only one company in this chart, Walmart, outperformed the S&P 500's 243% return. The vast majority of companies did not exceed 100%.
And for those who bought during the 2000 bubble, it took these companies 10 years to reach new highs and break even.
The ones that truly turned $1 into hundreds of thousands of times are a few high-growth windows (such as the post-World War II globalization expansion period, or the branding boom of the 80s and 90s), with small market caps compounded over decades.
Only in these human era cycles do such opportunities arise.