If you pick the right stock and hold it long enough, there's a shot that it could fund your entire retirement. Don't believe me? There are several of examples of companies that turned just $1,000 into $1 million, if held for the long term.
Of course, it's never exactly clear who these big winners will be when they first start out. Nevertheless, disruptive stocks with competitive advantages and huge addressable markets are prime candidates.
The following stocks have all three characteristics. While each appears somewhat expensive at the moment, their respective opportunities make them worth looking at amid the coronavirus sell-off. Who knows? A little money thrown their way could pay off big several years down the road.
These stocks could lead to huge gains over many years. Image source: Getty Images.
ASML Holdings
ASML Holding (ASML +6.97%) is not a small company by any means, with a market capitalization of $130 billion and a P/E ratio of 43. However, there's good reason for the market's optimism. ASML has a monopoly on extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), which has become a key process technology in semiconductor manufacturing.
As semiconductors pack more and more transistors onto a smaller and smaller spaces on silicon chips, many had thought things were starting to run up against the limits of Moore's Law, which states that the amount of transistors able to fit on a silicon chip doubles every one to two years.
Traditional lithography tools use 193-nanometer (nm) light to etch patterns on silicon wafers, which is becoming too large for today's smaller and smaller shrinking chip sizes. However, EUV's 13.5-nm light is so small that it can reduce the process steps in leading-edge chipmaking by 67% to 75%, by some estimates
Since ASML is the sole provider of this crucial technology, the company was able to grow revenue by 8% in 2019, which was essentially a deep recession year in the memory market. Fortunately, the logic and foundry market held up, and that's the sector that's currently using EUV machines to great effect.
ASML has a wide spectrum of semicap equipment products, and EUV made up only 31% of sales in 2019. However, that's up from 23% in 2018, as ASML increased EUV machine sales -- which can go for $125 million per unit -- from 18 in 2018 to 26 in 2019. More exciting, the company ended the year with a 43.5% growth in net bookings, which should point to strong growth in 2020.
Eventually, EUV could be used in DRAM memory manufacturing, whereas today it's pretty much used only in logic chips today. If that happens, ASML's growth could kick into another gear. Meanwhile, the company continues to return cash to shareholders in the form of rising dividends and buybacks.
The key point is that ASML has sole position of a key technology that will be important for the future of the semiconductor and memory markets. As such, ASML shares seem well worth their high price today.
XP
Newly public XP (XP +3.55%) aims to disrupt the Brazilian financial industry, and recent numbers suggest it may just do it. XP just went public on the Nasdaq in mid-December at $27 per share. Despite a huge recent sell-off on coronavirus news, shares still trade at a premium to their IPO, at $35 as of this writing.
What has investors so excited? XP is often characterized as the Charles Schwab (SCHW 0.27%) of Brazil. The company operates an open trading platform, along with its own in-house financial advisory. In addition, XP publishes proprietary digital investment content, which also doubles as an efficient marketing channel. The company's advisory is broken up into different brands, including the full-service XP direct for mass affluent clients, and Rico, an online portal for self-directed investors, Aside from retail investors, XP serves institutional clients as well.
XP has the potential to be a huge gainer because its market is large and dominated by five large, traditional banks. According to XP's registration document, management believes these five leaders, with roughly $1.5 trillion in assets under management, are generally inefficient, are limited in product, and charge high fees. While XP was started in 2001 and has had tremendous success to date, it still has only 3% market share in Brazil alone.
XP's stock is somewhat expensive at roughly 16 times trailing 12-month sales; however, it's also posting the growth numbers to back it up. Net revenue was up 66% and adjusted net income was up 75% through the first nine months of 2019.
As a new IPO and a Brazil-based company, XP is going to be volatile. Yet should XP continue its momentum and capitalize on the opportunity in front of it, it could be one of those stocks that sets you up for life.
MongoDB
The stock of MongoDB (MDB 0.53%) has absolutely crushed the market since its late 2017 initial public offering. How much? Well, the stock has nearly septupled to a whopping $159 per share as of this writing, up from an IPO price of $24.
What's the secret to MongoDB's success? Founded in 2007, MongoDB's founders sought to engineer a new kind of database technology that didn't go by the traditional row-and-column format. They came up with a document database, which stores data in a format that can connect elements outside of two-dimensional rows and columns. The architecture is much more appropriate for today's diverse types of unstructured data.
While other non-relational databases have attempted to come to market, MongoDB's leading position in document databases is turning the company into a juggernaut. Management has been quite adept at adding more and more enterprise-ready features to its document database since going public, satisfying the security needs of organizations large and small and winning impressive new clients.
The company has also adapted its technology for the cloud, so that clients can consume MongoDB as a database-as-a-service, instead of a subscription offering on a company's own data center. That cloud-based product, called MongoDB Atlas, grew a stunning 185% last quarter. And it's no small business; in the most recent quarter, Atlas made up 40% of MongoDB's revenue. Thus, the Atlas surge should keep MongoDB's overall growth rate of 52% fairly high.
Despite MongoDB's success to date, there's still plenty of room for growth. The company made only $383 million in revenue over the past 12 months, yet the global database market is $64 billion and growing in the high single-digits, according to research firm IDC. That means there's a long way to run for this mid-cap disruptor.
