Wall Street's pretty wild these days, and thankfully you don't need a lot of money to get in on the action. With so many brokers charging no commissions on stock trades and offering fractional share purchases, even a small investment can go to work in promising stocks regardless of their actual share price.
Roku (ROKU -0.41%), Fastly (FSLY -0.93%), and Chewy (CHWY -1.19%) are three stocks that can pay off nicely for folks with $1,000 to invest. The stocks trade between $45 and $105 a share, but if you can take advantage of free or nearly free trading commissions and can order fractional shares, your $1,000 can go a long way.
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Roku
We're streaming more than ever, but one of last year's hottest stocks has sat out the 2020 market revival. Roku stock is trading 22% lower so far this year, despite setting itself up nicely as a market leader of the streaming revolution. We've seen Roku's user base climb 37% over the past year to 39.8 million accounts by the end of March. Average revenue per user is moving higher as folks spend more time streaming and Roku gets better about monetizing its pole position.
Roku users are averaging more than 3.6 hours a day of time spent streaming its platform. With new services launching and marketers hungry to reach people who are dodging more traditional advertising outlets, this is Roku's moment to shine. The stock hasn't lived up to the hype after more than quadrupling in 2019, but it wouldn't be a surprise if Roku spends the balance of this year clawing its way back.
Fastly
Customers and potential customers aren't patient. If a page doesn't load quickly on the Web or their phones, they'll move on to something else, and that's where Fastly's platform delivers site stability during traffic spikes while allowing companies to save on infrastructure costs. Fastly isn't the only game in town when it comes to content delivery networks, but it's doing right by its growing client base.
The stock has more than quadrupled since bottoming out in March, and it's easy to see why after going over last month's blowout financial report. When Fastly hit the market in the springtime of 2019, it had posted 38% revenue growth in 2018. It followed that up with a 39% top-line burst in 2019, but its initial guidance for 2020 called for just 27% to 32% growth.
Everything changed after it posted 38% in revenue growth for the first quarter last month. It announced that it was experiencing customer expansion on its platform bolstered by a boom in traffic as a result of social distancing measures. It sees revenue accelerating to between 52% and 56% growth for the current quarter and a 40% to 45% increase for all of 2020.
Never bet against accelerating growth. Why get in front of a locomotive if you can ride it? Back-to-back years of accelerating revenue growth isn't a fluke. It's a trend. Adjusted gross margins, operating losses, and net losses are all improving. The stock has come a long way in a short time, but you don't need to catch every train at a station.
Chewy
We love our furry friends, and in trying times like these, pet adoptions tend to shoot higher. Chewy is an online retailer of pet supplies, and that places it at the perfect intersection in a surge in pet ownership and a reluctance to head out to bricks-and-mortar chains to load up on supplies.
Net sales rose 35% in its latest fiscal quarter, and that ended in early February, when the country didn't realize it would be strapping in for a prolonged shelter-in-place pandemic phase. Chewy reports financial results after Tuesday's market close, and analysts see revenue accelerating to a 41% growth rate. Don't be surprised if it's even better than what Wall Street is expecting.
The story won't end with a blowout financial performance on Tuesday. Even when we're back to shopping as usual Chewy will have won over pet owners with its e-commerce platform. There's no turning back at this point, and these young pets being adopted have long lives ahead of them. Chewy was doing well before, but the future will be even brighter.
Your $1,000 investment may not get a lot of shares of these three growth stocks, but that's more than enough. Great stocks appreciate, and owning a little is better than now owning nothing at all.
