Tech stocks tend to also be closely associated with innovation, disrupting old industries and creating new ones. This allows these technology companies to evolve and grow at an outsized pace for many years (if they have strong management teams and enough opportunity).
If you can handle some volatility along the way, great technology stocks will give your portfolio the growth that eventually creates generational wealth. Let's take a closer look at five leading technology stocks that investors should consider for 2022 and beyond.
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1. Cloudflare: Content delivery and edge computing
Cloudflare (NET -0.23%) started as a content delivery network (CDN), a network of servers distributed across the world that helps deliver web content. However, the company's evolved into a cloud platform that offers various network services to businesses, including cybersecurity and domain name server services, helping websites run quickly, efficiently, and securely.
Cloudflare has a lot of opportunities ahead for growth. Management estimates that the company's total addressable market (TAM) has grown from $32 billion in 2018 to $86 billion today, and it has its sights set on continuing to expand that with new services. Revenue rose 52% year over year in 2021 to $656 million, showing how much further it has to go yet. Cloudflare's cloud-based networking solutions should be helpful for the growth of applications like 5G, serverless computing, and the internet of things (IoT).
2. The Trade Desk: Digital ad technology
The Trade Desk (TTD 3.35%) is an advertising technology company that operates a marketplace where companies purchase advertising in digital spaces such as social media and streaming video. Trade Desk offers tools for customers to create, customize, and track ad campaigns, unlike traditional "walled gardens" like Meta Platforms, which hide user data from the customers buying ad inventory.
Advertising money is steadily flowing out of traditional avenues like broadcast cable and into these more data-driven areas like programmatic TV, where advertisers can target a specific group or audience. The global ad spending budget is estimated at around $725 billion per year, while the Trade Desk only saw just over $4 billion of that in 2020.
3. Crowdstrike: Cybersecurity
Crowdstrike Holdings (CRWD -0.68%) is a cybersecurity company that specializes in end-point protection, which secures the networks that computers or mobile devices connect to. Its Falcon Platform is its flagship product, a cloud-based network that learns and improves in real-time as it detects different threats.
The company sells different products and services through "modules." Customers can choose which and how many to buy. Crowdstrike's steadily grown its number of modules, expanding its addressable market. Data breaches can cost companies a lot of money, making cybersecurity likely a hot market going forward. Crowdstrike's annual recurring revenue was $1.5 billion as of Oct. 31, a 67% year-over-year increase. Crowdstrike is rated a "leader" in end-point protection by research firm Gartner, and could continue taking market share from traditional anti-virus companies.
4. Fiverr International: The gig economy
Fiverr International (FVRR 1.34%) is a marketplace where freelancers can sell services, ranging from graphic design to copywriting, video editing, and more. Fiverr provides a platform and tools to facilitate transactions between buyers and freelancers, then takes a percentage of the sales as revenue. Fiverr estimates that the total addressable market is $115 billion just in the United States.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a boost for Fiverr's business, and even though revenue growth has begun to revert to pre-pandemic levels, there's still a lot of long-term upside in Fiverr. The company is working on going "upstream," getting into higher-value services, and doing business with enterprise clients, increasing spending per buyer over time. The company's trailing-12-month revenue is still just $274 million, and grew 42% year over year in its most recent quarter, 2021 Q3, so there's a lot of potential growth to be had yet.
5. Search engine and cloud
Alphabet (GOOG 0.74%) (GOOGL 0.55%) is arguably the most established company on this list, and it's undoubtedly the largest, with a market cap of $1.8 trillion. Alphabet generates most of its revenue from ads with dominant internet platforms like Google Search and YouTube. It has a staggering 92% share of the world's search engine traffic, about as powerful a monopoly as any that exists.
Its business is a technology conglomerate; it owns Android, the leading mobile operating system software. Its cloud business is among the largest globally, competing with Amazon and Microsoft. The company's still rapidly growing despite its size; revenue grew 41% year over year in 2021, hitting $257 billion. The world is becoming increasingly digital, and investors can probably feel good about Alphabet's growth prospects because of how its businesses touch almost everywhere the internet goes.
