One of the best ways to maximize the growth of your individual retirement account is to invest in the stocks of competitively dominant businesses. It's even better if these companies have massive long-term growth opportunities that align with your investment time horizon. Done well, this strategy can help you build vast wealth by the time you retire.
To help you in this regard, here are two of the best growth stocks for your IRA available in the market today.
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The e-commerce titan
Few companies possess as many long-term growth drivers as Amazon.com (AMZN +0.81%). The online juggernaut is the dominant e-commerce platform in the U.S. and many other areas of the world. That's a particularly valuable position to be in, as -- despite years of torrid growth -- e-commerce remains just a small fraction of overall retail sales in most countries.
Incredibly, Amazon may have an even more powerful growth driver in its cloud-computing business. Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud infrastructure platform and has a greater-than-50% share of that market, according to research firm Gartner. Moreover, Gartner projects that the global cloud computing market will grow to more than $278 billion by 2021, up from $145 billion in 2017. This massive and rapidly expanding market should continue to fuel Amazon's growth in the coming years.
Add to this fast-growing advertising, smart-home technology, and grocery businesses, and it's clear that Amazon has many ways to win.
Yet Amazon's shares have pulled back sharply along with the rest of the market in recent weeks. With the stock now down almost 20% from its all-time high, Amazon currently trades at about 60 times forward earnings estimates. That's a fair price to pay for a competitively dominant business that's expected to grow its earnings by more than 44% annually over the next half-decade. Thus, you may want to use this recent market downturn as an opportunity to add some Amazon stock to your IRA.
The software star
Like Amazon, salesforce.com (CRM +3.19%) has incredible long-term growth prospects. Salesforce is the global leader in customer relationship management (CRM) software, the largest and fastest-growing segment in the enormous enterprise software market.
Salesforce dominates its industry; its CRM market share is greater than that of its three nearest competitors combined. Better still, Salesforce is likely to see its market share increase in the coming years. Its recent acquisition of MuleSoft is a game changer. MuleSoft's best-in-class data integration solutions are enjoying strong demand and helping Salesforce win new business at a rapid clip.
Fueled in part by MuleSoft's torrid growth, Salesforce expects to nearly double its current revenue base to $23 billion by fiscal 2022. Yet even if the company achieves its goal -- and all signs suggest that it will -- Salesforce's revenue would account for only about 4% of the $537 billion in enterprise software spending that Gartner estimates will take place at that time. That leaves plenty of market opportunity for Salesforce to capture, particularly as its data integration services grow in importance in the years ahead.
Like Amazon, Salesforce's shares have pulled back in recent weeks along with the market. Down more than 10% from its all-time high, Salesforce now trades for about 52 times forward earnings estimates -- a reasonable price for an elite business that's projected to increase its profit more than 30% annually over the next five years. As such, you may want to consider adding this outstanding growth stock to your IRA today.
