The first third of 2022 has been an exceptionally rough one for investors of all stripes. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is more than 10% off the high water mark it set in January and it's the most buoyant of the major stock market indexes.
The Nasdaq Composite, which is chock-full of innovative growth stocks is really taking it on the chin. This tech-heavy index has fallen more than 23% from its peak in January.
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When the bottom falls out from under the market, investors have a tendency to avoid buying new stocks because it seems too risky. If there's one thing to remember about buying stocks, it's that bear markets apply pressure to all stocks whether their underlying businesses are succeeding or not.
Right now Nvidia (NVDA -3.87%), Roku (ROKU -0.40%), and Digital Ocean (DOCN -0.54%) are trading at a fraction of their former values. As you'll soon see, they're not underperforming by any measure. Here's why they look like terrific stocks to buy during this bear market.
Nvidia
Shares of this chipmaker have been under a lot more pressure than you'd expect given the company's pace of growth and forward outlook. Nvidia's stock price is down 44% since it peaked last fall.
Nvidia hasn't been falling due to poor performance. During the company's fiscal fourth quarter ended Jan. 30, 2022, total revenue soared 53% year over year to $7.64 billion.
Investors can look forward to many more years of market-beating performance from the graphics-card specialist. That's because the graphics cards that made Nvidia a darling of gamers everywhere are now responsible for less than half of total revenue.
Gamers use more graphics processing units (GPUs) than any other industry, but this won't be the case for much longer. Nvidia's non-gamer initiatives are firing on all cylinders. For example, the Nvidia Drive platform is already used by 20 out of 30 electric vehicle companies and eight out of 10 autonomous-taxi businesses.
Roku
Roku's stock price soared when COVID-related lockdowns were keeping more of us at home all day. Unfortunately, it's tumbled around 80% from the high water mark it set last summer.
Roku's been under a lot of pressure lately because Netflix reported a declining number of subscribers during the first quarter of 2022. Now, investors aren't nearly as confident about Roku's ability to continue adding new viewers in an increasingly competitive market.
Since the start of the pandemic, we've seen heaps of new ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) services begin competing for our attention. That's because showing targeted ads to internet-connected televisions is an increasingly lucrative business compared to old-fashioned broadcast television. In the first three months of 2022, the average amount of revenue generated by Roku users rose 34% over the previous year to $42.31 per user.
People use their Roku-enabled television to watch the Roku channel plus all the new AVOD services . This is how we can be reasonably confident this company will remain a top benefactor in the ongoing shift away from linear TV and subscription-supported video on demand.
Maintaining the popularity of Roku-enabled devices has gotten expensive due to temporary supply chain challenges that raised the company's equipment costs and squeezed profit margins. The international supply chains that allowed the world's TV manufacturers to squeeze out a slim profit on a $200 television weren't built overnight. It's probably just a matter of time before this ship rights itself and allows the company to become strongly profitable again.
DigitalOcean
Shares of DigitalOcean rocketed up to incredible heights last year. Since peaking last November, though, this independent cloud service provider has taken a 73% plunge.
This stock was beaten severely after reporting first-quarter earnings that didn't meet the expectations of Wall Street analysts. Investors don't need to worry about a slowdown, though, the company beat topline estimates with total revenue that grew 36% year over year.
With just $509 million in annualized revenue, DigitalOcean hardly even registers on the radar of cloud industry giants like Amazon and Microsoft. Its size isn't necessarily a disadvantage. DigitalOcean's aiming for individuals and small-to-medium-size businesses with an emphasis on small. DigitalOcean's gigantic competitors do offer services but at shockingly higher rates that individuals and many small businesses find unacceptable. DigitalOcean even lets developers build and deploy apps for $0 per month.
DigitalOcean's highly competitive upfront pricing is drawing new developers who appear keen to grow with the company. The number of clients that spend more than $50 per month rose 20% year over year. That was more than three times the overall pace of customer growth.
Estimates suggest global cloud computing revenue will grow more than 20% annually and pass $500 billion by 2027. This company might only be able to carve out a small corner of the global market for cloud computing services but it still has plenty of room to grow.
