The major market indexes have entered rally mode over the last month, but the S&P 500 index, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Nasdaq Composite are all still down anywhere from 10% to 20% year to date.
While no one knows where the markets will finish the year, companies that are still reporting high revenue growth rates in this environment certainly have advantages working in their favor and could be home-run stocks in the next bull market.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD -5.44%), Datadog (DDOG -3.94%), and Monday.com (MNDY -3.80%) all recently reported fantastic growth rates in the second quarter. With their share prices well off their highs, there's no better time to add these stocks to your nest egg.
1. Advanced Micro Devices
Shares of AMD are down 33% year to date but have rallied about 20% over the last month. Weakness in PC shipments has weighed on semiconductor stocks this year, most notably Intel and Nvidia. But AMD is performing relatively well, and even better, the stock trades at a relatively low valuation.
AMD reported a whopping 70% year-over-year increase in revenue for the second quarter. Adjusted earnings per share were also strong, rising 67% year over year. Growth was driven by the recent acquisition of Xilinx, a leading maker of programmable chips, in addition to strong performance from data centers.
AMD noted a decline in gaming graphics processing units (GPUs) sales, which echoes what Nvidia is reporting. Because Nvidia's main products are GPUs, it is suffering the consequences of declining demand in the gaming hardware market. Nvidia expects revenue to be down 17% year over year when it reports earnings results on Aug. 24. AMD's product lineup spanning GPUs and central processing units (CPUs) is leading to stronger performance compared to the competition in the near term.
To keep the momentum going, AMD is on schedule to launch the 5-nanometer Genoa CPU for servers later this year, which could pave the way for further market share gains against its top CPU competitor Intel.
Given AMD's growth, the stock looks like a steal at its current price-to-earnings ratio of 22 based on forward earnings estimates. That's just slightly more expensive than the average stock in the S&P 500 index.
2. Datadog
Datadog is a leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that helps companies monitor their cloud infrastructure and security and troubleshoot problem areas across their data systems. Companies are seeking out cloud-based monitoring tools to oversee their operations as they migrate their data systems over to the cloud. Because of this, buying shares of Datadog is another way investors can gain exposure to the cloud computing megatrend.
Revenue growth has been terrific, up 83% and 74%, respectively, in the first and second quarters. While management is cautious about the potential for demand to soften in the second half of the year due to the uncertain economic environment, Datadog brings enormous value to companies in challenging times, given the greater efficiency gains its DevOps platform provides. It should continue to report relatively strong growth in the near term.
Full-year guidance calls for revenue to increase between 56% and 58% over 2021. The company is continuing to spend about 42% of its revenue on research and development while generating a 15% free-cash-flow margin. Over time, the market may reward Datadog with a higher valuation for its balanced top- and bottom-line growth.
Datadog's profitability at this early stage of its growth curve reflects a strong business. Gartner recently named Datadog a leader in the 2022 Magic Quadrant for application performance monitoring and observability -- the second consecutive year Datadog has been named on this prestigious list.
Investors should be aware that the cloud monitoring market is highly competitive. Datadog faces competition from well-entrenched larger companies with greater financial resources. If growth were to sharply taper off, I would sell and look for better opportunities. But as long as Datadog continues to reinvest in new features and sees those investments rewarded with more customers adopting its platform, investors could realize substantial gains on their investment over the next decade and beyond.
3. Monday.com
Monday.com is another fast-growing software stock that provides tremendous value for companies. Its flagship product is Work OS -- an open platform that helps business teams more efficiently collaborate on projects and troubleshoot problems during software development.
It's a competitive market with numerous alternatives for companies to choose from, but Monday's easy-to-use interface is winning so far. The company just reported second-quarter earnings results, where revenue soared 75% year over year, compared to 84% in the first quarter.
Those are strong numbers. The added bonus was that clients continued to spend on additional services. The net-dollar-retention rate was over 150% for customers spending more than $50,000 annually, which is outstanding for a SaaS company.
Monday continues investing in new services. It recently announced a customer relationship management (CRM) service that provides automated tasks, customization, and other tools to help companies manage sales leads. This is another highly competitive market, with Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, and Adobe commanding the lion's share of the CRM market.
Still, Monday's main advantage is its open platform, which can sync with external services, including integration with Salesforce. It's a good sign that Monday is continuing to expand globally. In May, the company opened a new office in London to serve as the company's European headquarters as it expands in the U.K. and worldwide. This is clearly in preparation for the growing demand management sees for its services.
Monday stock is not cheap, trading at 15 times sales, but neither was Salesforce in its early growth days. Monday's consistently high growth is a mirror reflection of Salesforce's annual growth around 2005 as it rocketed toward multibagger returns for investors. Monday is still a small company operating in a $56 billion market, which could lead to similar results.
