This has been an absolutely rotten year to be a growth stock investor. The iShares S&P 500 Growth ETF has fallen a staggering 26% this year.
But the dark clouds hanging over the market are lined with silver for patient investors who stick with terrific businesses like Roku (ROKU -0.40%), SoFi Technologies (SOFI -0.56%), and Matterport (MTTR -1.11%). That's because a stock market scorned for growth stocks in general has driven shares of these former market darlings down to prices they can easily bounce back from.
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Roku
Roku shares are down about 80% from the peak they reached last summer. Analysts on Wall Street who follow the company expect a swift rebound. The average price target for Roku represents a 70% premium over recent prices.
Now that the stay-at-home orders meant to blunt the spread of the coronavirus are no longer in play, Roku stock has lost a lot of its luster. The stock's dive isn't due to poor performance. First-quarter revenue soared 28% year over year. That's especially impressive because at the beginning of the previous-year period, hardly anyone had been vaccinated yet.
Roku added 1.1 million accounts in the first quarter and ended March with 61.3 million in total. As more advertisers shift their budgets away from linear broadcasting and toward ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD), those accounts are becoming more valuable. On a trailing-12-month basis, average revenue soared 34% year over year to $42.91 per user.
You need a streaming stick or a Roku-enabled television to be an active user, so the company tries to encourage their uptake by keeping these devices relatively inexpensive. Supply chain shortages are leading to losses from the manufacturing side of Roku's operation, but this is most likely a temporary problem.
As a practice, targeted advertising on connected televisions is still in its early days. The investments Roku is making to gain a leading share of the AVOD market could pay off many times over for patient shareholders.
SoFi Technologies
SoFi shares rocketed higher after the company's stock market debut in late 2020. Unfortunately, it has fallen about 70% from last year's high-water mark.
Analysts who keep tabs on SoFi think the up-and-coming consumer-focused bank can regain some of those losses. The consensus price target for SoFi represents a 64% premium over its price now.
Like many fintech stocks, SoFi has been under an unusual amount of pressure because nobody really knows if the company can succeed in a rising interest rate environment. Investors are also concerned about the ongoing student loan moratorium because SoFi cut its teeth refinancing student loans and this is still part of the company's overall operation.
Thanks to the rapid growth and diversification of SoFi's revenue sources, the persistent student loan moratorium hardly makes a dent. In the first quarter, SoFi's total customer base shot up by 408,000 members to reach 3.9 million.
The integrated application keeps encouraging customers to engage with multiple products including mortgages, credit cards, and retirement accounts. SoFi customers began using 689,000 new products in the first quarter, bringing the total up to 5.9 million.
In addition to an expanding customer base, SoFi owns Galileo, which provides the financial industry's most popular tools for setting up new accounts and implementing payment systems. With multiple growth engines pushing it forward, investors who hold this stock could come out miles ahead over the long run.
Matterport
Matterport shares are down 84% from the high-water mark they set last fall. Wall Street analysts expect a rebound up ahead. The consensus target for this metaverse stock is 76% above recent prices.
Matterport helps individuals and organizations create digital twins of real-world spaces, and its popularity is surging. The company finished the first quarter with 562,000 subscribers, which was 70% more than it had a year earlier.
Matterport allows its lowest-tier subscribers to use their smartphones to make basic maps of their homes and offices for free. Now the company has 7.3 million spaces under management, which is many times more than all of its competitors combined.
In the first quarter, Matterport signed a deal with Midland Holdings. This is a giant residential real estate broker in China that intends to create virtual 3D experiences for its entire portfolio of properties. It's probably just a matter of time before digital twins are a standard feature of real estate listings everywhere. With a commanding lead in this burgeoning industry, this stock has a chance to explode higher in the years to come.
