The top stock picks by millennials and Robinhood investors are often some of the highest-profile stocks on the market. Apple, Tesla, Facebook, and Disney make most top-25 lists for millennial investors, and then there are meme stocks thrown in, like AMC, GameStop, and Sundial Growers.
Often overlooked are some of the companies that work behind the scenes to make businesses run more efficiently. One stock that should be right up the alley of millennial investors is Salesforce (CRM 1.27%), the software-as-a-service (SaaS) stock that powers companies worldwide.
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Salesforce is a perfect millennial stock
There are a number of factors that make Salesforce a great stock for millennials with a tolerance for high risk and the time to let the company mature and grow.
- Connectivity: Salesforce is increasingly becoming the connection hub for businesses around the world. Not only is the Salesforce software a key tool for sales teams to track and convert leads, but the acquisition of Slack will also make Salesforce an important communication source for entire companies.
- Growth: Over the last decade, Salesforce has grown revenue by 1,090% and shows no signs of slowing down.
- SaaS: It's become commonplace for software to be sold as a service, and Salesforce has some of the most valuable and functional software in the industry. The customer relationship management platform, automated emails, commerce, and more provide direct dollars in return for a business, and SaaS is high margin and highly scalable.
These features are the kinds of things millennial investors seem to favor with some of their stock picks. What Salesforce seems to have working against it is a brand that's not recognizable to most consumers.
It's hard to see behind the scenes
Salesforce's business model works behind the scenes. Companies and sales staff rely on it day to day, but consumers rarely see the company's products directly. At best, consumers may get automated email marketing that comes from Salesforce, but they're unlikely to even know it.
Slack could change this dynamic. The acquisition of Slack brings Salesforce into a more consumer-facing product. It's a business tool for sure, but it blurs the lines between business and personal in many ways.
What's important to understand from an investment perspective is how sticky Salesforce software can be. Once the product starts to become valuable within an organization, Salesforce can add tools to the portfolio and engrain itself even further. This is how Microsoft grew its business in the 1980s and '90s, and Salesforce is doing that today.
It's still a growth machine
As big as Salesforce is, the company is still growing rapidly. It's grown consistently over the past decade, and I don't see momentum slowing.
CRM Revenue (TTM) data by YCharts. TTM = trailing 12 months.
There's no question that shares are expensive at a price-to-sales ratio around 20 and a price-to-earnings ratio around 50, but that's the price investors have to pay for high-quality businesses. Salesforce should be a top stock for millennial investors, especially given its quality compared to some of the hottest meme stocks on the market.
