Robinhood Markets (HOOD 3.37%) has become a popular brokerage for young investors. Its offer of no-fee trading and its easy-to-use app interface helps the Silicon Valley company gamify investing for millions of people around the country. It also keeps a running list of the stocks its users hold the most. That list has helped analysts and journalists track which stocks are gaining and losing popularity on the platform.
Some of the most widely held stocks on the Robinhood platform are high-risk investments like meme stocks or money-losing companies like Peloton Interactive. But there are also some promising companies with stocks that can be potentially great additions to anyone's portfolio.
Here are two popular Robinhood stocks that have a chance to beat the market over the next decade.
1. Netflix
Netflix (NFLX -0.08%) is the 13th most widely held stock among Robinhood users at the moment. Netflix, one of the dominant video streaming companies worldwide, has approximately 221 million paying subscribers. It is also one of the top-performing stocks of the last 20 years, up over 27,000% in that time.
But lately, the stock has been down in the dumps, with share prices falling 59% this year. So what went wrong? It all comes down to stagnating subscriber growth. In the last two quarters, Netflix has lost paying subscribers (200,000 in the first quarter and about 1 million in the second), which has startled investors who thought it had many years left to grow its base.
The company is also seeing major foreign exchange headwinds due to the appreciating U.S. dollar and having a lot of operations outside the United States.
Even with all these headwinds, Netflix still grew its revenue by 9% year over year in the second quarter to $7.97 billion, and it has generated $31 billion in revenue over the past 12 months.
To fix its slowing subscriber growth, the company plans two strategies: a reduction in improper account sharing and the introduction of advertising. According to Netflix, over 100 million households around the world have access to Netflix but are not paying for it. Over the next few years, it is going to experiment on how to eliminate this password sharing, which should hopefully lead to more people paying for the service.
As for advertising, Netflix has partnered with Microsoft on an ad-supported subscription tier starting in 2023, something it has never done before. The ad-tier subscription will likely be less expensive and could bring back dropped subscribers who find the current monthly rate too high.
These incremental revenue streams should help Netflix grow its revenue and bottom line at a healthy clip this decade. If you still believe in the trend of streaming video, I think this makes the stock a potential market beater this decade.
2. Meta Platforms (Facebook)
Meta Platforms (META 0.14%) is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Like Netflix, Meta is going through a rough patch, with the stock price down 47% this year. It is also the 12th most widely held stock among Robinhood users at the moment.
Across its ad-focused businesses -- mainly Facebook and Instagram -- Meta is facing major headwinds from Apple's data restriction policies, a slowdown of the advertising market in 2022, and competition from TikTok. This caused revenue to decline by 1% year over year in the second quarter, Meta's first revenue decline ever as a public company.
Investors are also wary about the company's Reality Labs and metaverse investments. The segment lost $2.8 billion last quarter on only $452 million in revenue, with management stating it expects the segment to burn $10 billion annually for the foreseeable future. This brought Meta's consolidated operating margin down from 43% in the second quarter of 2021 to 29% a year later.
So why be bullish on Meta stock? First, the company's social media applications are still seeing strong use around the globe. Total daily active people across its services hit 2.88 billion in June, up 4% year over year, with even the legacy app Facebook growing daily active users by 3% year over year in the month.
Clearly, people are still using Meta's services even with the onslaught of competitors like TikTok. If and when the advertising market recovers around the world in the next few quarters, Meta's revenue should recover along with it.
Second, Meta has barely scratched the service with the monetization potential of WhatsApp. The messaging and social platform has approximately 2 billion users (Meta doesn't give out specific data), who are not monetized through ads at the moment. The company also plans to monetize the service through its premium WhatsApp Business services and WhatsApp Payments. While still in their early days, these services have tons of potential with how many users WhatsApp has around the globe.
And third, Meta stock is just flat-out cheap. At a market cap of $482 billion, the stock is trading at a trailing price-to-operating income (P/OI) of just 12, which is way below the market average.
And this is while the Reality Labs investments are losing $10 billion a year. If those bear any fruit whatsoever, Meta's stock will look even cheaper a decade from now, making it a clear candidate to beat the market this decade.
