3 Wildly Undervalued Stocks to Buy and Hold for the Next Decade

One of the hardest lessons for me as a new investor was to stop filtering out great, high-quality stocks that looked expensive by most traditional valuation metrics. Instead, I sought standard "value" and found companies that were incredibly cheap, but often seriously broken, that unfortunately deserved their discounted valuations.

By simply accepting that most premium stocks trade at expensive-looking valuations, I entered the land of long-term investing and ultimately multibagger potential.

Today we will study Zoom Video Communications (ZM 0.97%), Pinterest (PINS 3.81%), and DocuSign (DOCU -0.51%), three stocks that fit this expensive-looking mold, yet could be wildly undervalued when looking out over the next decade, thanks to their high revenue growth and strong free cash flow (FCF) generation.

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High growth at intriguing valuations

Data source: Yahoo! Finance and CMLViz statistics. Note that Levered FCF and Revenue Growth are using trailing 12-month figures. YOY = year over year. FCF = free cash flow. P/FCF = price-to-FCF.

While highly unscientific, one of my favorite ways to measure a stock's growth potential versus its current price is to compare year-over-year revenue growth with its price-to-FCF ratio. As shown in the table above, Zoom, Pinterest, and DocuSign all have a growth rate higher than their FCF multiples.

Whenever a stock's growth rate is higher than its FCF multiple, it catches my attention, highlighting the beautiful combination of solid sales growth with reasonably priced cash generation. With that in mind, let's look at my three recommendations.

1. Zoom Video Communications

First up today is the fastest growing and cheapest valuation of the trio, Zoom Video Communications. Because its share price has dropped nearly 50% over the last six months amid decelerating sales growth, Zoom looks attractively valued compared to the $1.5 billion in free cash flow it created over the previous 12 months.

While its 100% revenue growth over the last 12 months will probably not repeat in 2022, its third-quarter growth of 35% year over year is more than enough to make its freshly discounted valuation appealing. Furthermore, with 14 consecutive quarters with a dollar-based net expansion (DBNE) rate above 130%, Zoom has demonstrated that its land-and-expand business model is firing on all cylinders.

DBNE is a great way to measure increased product use by existing customers, despite not accounting for customer churn. For Zoom, this 130% rate is highly promising as it shows that it is getting its foot in the door with its famous Meetings product and upselling customers on newer products, such as Zoom Rooms and Zoom Phone. Should the company's DBNE continue at these levels, it will signal that its business model is still succeeding.

Furthermore, with international sales only accounting for 33% of Zoom's total revenue, its global ambitions are still in their infancy. This international growth runway, paired with the company's strong FCF and recently discounted share price, makes Zoom a great core holding for the next decade.

2. Pinterest

Next up, we have Pinterest with its inspiration-creating platform and newly developed FCF generation. Unfortunately, despite the promise of these positive cash flows, Pinterest's stock has dropped over 50% in the last six months, due to a rumored abandoned acquisition by PayPal and a decline in monthly active users (MAUs).

But two key things are happening behind the scenes for Pinterest, making today's valuation very tempting.

First, the company's fledgling shopping features are starting to take off, with product searches up over 100% for the third quarter, year over year. Better yet, members of the all-important Generation Z demographic (ages 9 to 24) increased their product searches on the shop tab by over 200% for the third quarter.

Second, despite having four times the number of international MAUs than in the U.S., the international segment only accounts for 21% of Pinterest's overall revenue. This is due to the massive gap in average revenue per user (ARPU) between U.S. and international users, which is $5.55 and $0.38, respectively.

This gap is essential for investors to watch as Pinterest launched its shopping features in seven key international markets during the third quarter: Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Brazil, and Mexico. As these markets mature, along with Pinterest's shopping features in general, investors should see this ARPU gap between the U.S. and international narrow, bringing strong monetization to the company's global footprint.

3. DocuSign

Famous for its e-signature product, DocuSign is on a mission to prove that it is more than just a one-trick pony. Moving beyond its e-signature dominance, the company has its eyes set on a broader target market that it hopes to serve through its Agreement Cloud, which consists of four segments: prepare, sign, act, and manage.

With its Agreement Cloud, DocuSign intends to parlay its leadership in e-signatures into becoming the leader in automated end-to-end agreement processes. While the company does not break out numbers for each segment of the Agreement Cloud, we can get a good idea of its ongoing success through DocuSign's 121% dollar-based net retention (DBNR) rate.

DBNR shows the rate at which existing customers are expanding their use of the company's products. Since DBNR includes customer churn, a figure above 120% is exceptional. So DocuSign's track record of being above this mark for six consecutive quarters is very impressive. It highlights the potential that might be building within the company's broader Agreement Cloud ambitions. And that makes DocuSign's 30% share-price drop in the last month an appealing entry point for new investors.

DocuSign already has a 17% FCF margin, which makes it look like another discounted, but strong, cash-generating stock to buy and hold for the next decade.