2 Fantastic Growth Stocks to Buy Right Now

Every investor is always looking for the next great growth stock to buy. Not every stock has what it takes to deliver huge gains, but a few do. In this Motley Fool Live video recorded on Feb. 9, 2021, The Wrap host Jason Hall and Fool.com Keith Speights discuss two fantastic growth stocks to buy right now that are poised to be big winners.

Jason Hall: Yeah, let's pivot over to thinking about investing opportunity right now in the healthcare space. There's a couple of stocks that I know you wanted to talk about, what do you have to share with us?

Keith Speights: These have nothing to do whatsoever with COVID-19. Well, maybe one kind of, sort of. But one of the stocks that I think is essentially a no-brainer stock to buy right now is a stock called Cresco Labs (CRLBF -4.76%). It's a US cannabis operator, it operates in multiple states.

You can't buy it on the major stock exchanges in the US right now because marijuana is still illegal at the federal level. But the ticker, their CRLBF, it's available over-the-counter in the US.

Cresco Labs is just a solid company. They're one of the biggest multi-state cannabis operators out there. The market cap right now is around three-and-a-half billion dollars, I think what really jumps out about that market cap is that it's much lower than Cresco's peers. Many of those peers have revenue in the same ballpark as Cresco Labs generates, so Cresco is not a value stock by any means -- none of the marijuana stocks are -- but relative to its peers, Cresco Labs actually has a pretty attractive valuation.

Like I said, they're in multiple states including their home state of Illinois, which has a fast-growing recreational marijuana market. Cresco just recently received a license to sell recreational marijuana in Arizona where they are already in the medical market there. Arizona voted in November to legalize recreational marijuana, so that market is opening up, so Cresco has a great, great growth opportunity there. New Jersey recently also voted to legalize recreational marijuana, I think you'll see Cresco move into that market. New York is rumbling about maybe legalizing recreational marijuana as well, so I think Cresco's opportunities are really great.

Then add on to all that the real prospects that Congress will decriminalize marijuana this year. If that happens, there are a couple of things to watch out for: Number 1, Cresco, as I mentioned, trades over-the-counter right now, decriminalization would open the door for Cresco to list its shares on one of the major stock exchanges, the NASDAQ (NDAQ 0.47%) or New York Stock Exchange, that would make it more easily accessible to many investors. For example, the Robinhood platform doesn't offer many of these over-the-counter stocks, you can't buy Cresco Labs on Robinhood right now. If that happened, Cresco...

Hall: That alone is like 10X the market cap.

Speights: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

Hall: Well, for a few weeks anyway.

Speights: Yeah. Yeah. But it would make a significant difference even aside from the 10x kind of phenomena that we've seen on some of these Robinhood stocks. But that would be a huge catalyst for the stock.

I think if you compare US marijuana stocks against their Canadian peers, US marijuana stock's valuations are much lower based on the revenue they're generating. I think that would be a huge catalyst for Cresco Labs. I also think just access to financial services -- right now there are some federal laws that prevent access to traditional banking services to cannabis companies, and that could change this year or go into effect may be starting next year.

Assuming all of this goes through Congress and I think it will, and so I think you're going to see 2021 being maybe the biggest year for US-based marijuana stocks ever and Cresco Labs is one of the stocks that I think is best poised to benefit from that. If you're the kind of investor who is open to investing in marijuana stocks, Cresco Labs is the one to check out.

Another one that I really like is Guardant Health (GH -3.60%), ticker there is GH. Guardant Health is a pioneer in liquid biopsy.

If you're not familiar with what liquid biopsy is: When you think of biopsy, you think of cutting, a doctor cuts into the patient to get a tissue biopsy to send off to have an analysis run to see if they have cancer. But what liquid biopsy is is it's a blood test (usually blood, it can be other bodily fluids, but it's usually blood). What they do is they analyze the blood and they can detect the DNA of tumor cells or fragments of DNA off of tumor cells in the bloodstream, and they analyze the DNA to determine if cancer is present and it has a huge opportunity.

Guardant Health is a pioneer in this field, they already have three products on the market, their flagship product is Guardant360 companion diagnostic test for some cancer immunotherapies and sales are booming for it. But their big opportunity is getting into recurrence monitoring for cancer and early cancer detection. Along the recurrence monitoring front, Guardant Health is launching their first product called Guardant Reveal, they're launching it in the first quarter, I think it has a big opportunity, and then they're conducting clinical studies on another liquid biopsy that can detect cancer at very early stages. I think you're going to see more news from later this year.

The overall market for these kind of products is well over $50 billion a year. Guardant Health has a market cap of around $16 billion right now, and so I really like it. David Gardner, co-founder of Motley Fool, talks about, invest in the kind of companies that make the future you believe in. I'm paraphrasing what he says. But Guardant Health is the kind of stock that does that for me. They could change the dynamics for cancer diagnosis with what they're doing and make a lot of money on the process, and that's the kind of stock I love to invest in.