Following months of discussion, lawmakers in Washington are close to passing another round of fiscal stimulus. This will entail another round of stimulus checks for the American public.
Congress passed $600 stimulus checks for eligible Americans in late December, and now the expectation is that well over 100 million Americans will qualify for a $1,400 stimulus check. For many, this cash will help them cover their rent or mortgage, utility bills, or other pressing needs.
But for people who’ve been relatively unaffected by the coronavirus pandemic and who have hearty emergency funds, this $1,400 stimulus check could be the perfect excuse to put that money to work in the stock market. After all, the S&P 500 has doubled investors’ money, inclusive of dividend reinvestment, about once every seven years since 1980.
But you can probably do better than a 100% gain this decade. If you buy innovative, high-powered stocks with your $1,400 stimulus check and demonstrate the patience to allow your thesis to come to fruition, the following three stocks could turn that $1,400 check into $10,000 (or more).
Fastly
One supercharged growth stock that has the potential to double investors’ stimulus checks many times over is cloud edge services provider Fastly (NYSE:FSLY).
In simple terms, Fastly is tasked with safely and securely expediting the delivery of content to end users. Since it’s a usage-based operating model, it’s important for Fastly to be scalable with existing clients, as well as be appealing enough to draw in new customers.
During the fourth quarter, the company reported a dollar-based net expansion rate (DBNER) of 143%, which was down only slightly from a DBNER of 147% in Q3 2020. In layman’s terms, this figure means existing clients spent a respective 43% and 47% more in Q4 and Q3 than they did in the prior-year period. Fastly’s total customer count also rose by 37 to 2,084.
The good news for buyers is that Wall Street hasn’t been thrilled with Fastly of late, which means it’s on sale. Total customer growth slowed quite a bit in Q4 (albeit one quarter doesn’t make a trend), and the company lost traffic from its top customer TikTok in the third quarter. The loss of TikTok’s traffic had to do with parent ByteDance locked into a stateside spat with the Trump administration. In other words, it wasn’t Fastly’s fault.
The expectation is that we’ll see edge cloud demand ramp up throughout the decade as businesses and consumers push online and into the cloud. Wall Street’s current expectation is for Fastly to nearly triple sales by 2024 to $850 million, with its growth rate likely maintaining a 30% (or higher) level for much of the 2020s. With a reasonably low market cap of less than $8 billion, it looks to offer serious upside to patient investors.
Ping Identity
Another growth stock that’s a bit unloved of late but has plenty of long-term upside is cybersecurity stock Ping Identity (NYSE:PING).
To build off what was discussed with Fastly, businesses are rapidly moving to an online and cloud-based presence. That means the onus of protecting company and customer information is falling into the laps of third-party providers on a regular basis. And since hackers don’t take time off, cybersecurity has evolved into a basic-need service.
Ping Identity’s specialty is (as the name implies) identity verification. Aside from well-known solutions, such as two-factor authentication to weed out threats, Ping’s cloud-native approach leans on artificial intelligence and machine learning to grow smarter over time. The better Ping’s solutions are at identifying threats, the more nimble it can be in responding to them.
The biggest issue for the company in 2020 was the decline in multiyear subscriptions and the uptick in one-year subscriptions. While this isn’t a surprise, given the record-breaking uncertainty caused by the pandemic, it’s slowed growth temporarily and caused customer-churn concerns to arise.
The good news is that Ping Identity has had no issue attracting larger businesses. The company claims 60% of the Fortune 100 as customers, with 51 of its clients generating over $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). That’s up from 38 customers with an ARR over $1 million in 2019.
Full story on Fool.com
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