What happened
Shares of MongoDB (MDB -0.04%) climbed 24.5% in January, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, as multiple analysts weighed in with positive notes on the database software leader.
So what
For perspective, MongoDB only just fell 11.5% in December, giving up its initial post-earnings gains even after the company's third-quarter results handily exceeded Wall Street's expectations. Perhaps it should have come as no surprise, then, when Piper Sandler analyst Brent Bracelin singled out MongoDB on Jan. 8 as one of his top software-as-a-service (SaaS) stock ideas with "multibillion potential" for the coming decade.
Shares continued to rise later that week when Barclays analyst Raimo Lenschow named MongoDB as one of several SaaS growth stocks investors should own this year as the cloud computing sector continues to outpace the broader market's gains.
Now what
Indeed, MongoDB should benefit as the world increasingly embraces the need to organize and utilize hoards of unstructured data like pictures, audio, and video files -- a task to which MongoDB's flagship NoSQL database structures are uniquely well suited. So while it's hard to argue that this fast-growing, currently unprofitable stock is "cheap" by traditional valuation methods (it trades at an eye-watering 24.6 times trailing-12-month sales as of this writing), it's no surprise to see growth-hungry investors placing calculated bets that the best is yet to come.