Many growth stocks have fallen out of favor this year as rising interest rates and other macro headwinds have driven investors toward cheaper value plays. However, these pullbacks can represent great buying opportunities for investors who aren't rattled by a little near-term volatility.
If you've got $3,000 to invest, you could buy a few shares of promising growth stocks CrowdStrike (CRWD 0.13%), AMD (AMD 1.33%), and Meta Platforms (META -10.56%) and there's a chance they will double within a few years.
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1. CrowdStrike
Many cybersecurity companies install on-site appliances to run their services. Those appliances take up a lot of space, require regular maintenance, and can be difficult to scale as an organization expands. To address those issues, a new generation of cybersecurity players challenged the industry leaders with subscription-based cloud services that don't require any on-site appliances. CrowdStrike, which went public three years ago, is one of these disruptive newcomers.
CrowdStrike's revenue rose 82% in fiscal 2021 -- which ended Jan. 31, 2021 -- and increased 66% to $1.45 billion in fiscal 2022. It anticipates another 51% to 52% revenue growth in the current fiscal year. It also turned profitable on an adjusted basis in fiscal 2021, and its adjusted net profit surged 157% to $161 million in fiscal 2022. It expects that figure to climb 76% to 83% in fiscal 2023.
CrowdStrike ended its latest quarter with 17,945 subscription customers, representing 57% growth from a year ago. Seventy-one percent of those customers had adopted four or more of its cloud-based modules, compared to 64% a year earlier. That increasing stickiness indicates its "land and expand" strategies are working.
CrowdStrike's stock isn't cheap at 21 times this year's sales, but it arguably deserves that premium valuation. It's already established an early-mover's advantage in its niche of cloud-native cybersecurity services, and it will likely profit from the secular expansion of the broader cybersecurity sector.
2. AMD
AMD was once considered a distant underdog to Intel in x86 CPUs and Nvidia in discrete GPUs. But under CEO Lisa Su, who took the helm in 2014, AMD gained significant market share against Intel in CPUs, kept pace with Nvidia with new GPUs, and blended together its CPUs and GPUs in custom APUs for Sony's PlayStation consoles and Microsoft's Xbox consoles.
Instead of stubbornly manufacturing its own chips like Intel, AMD spun off its capital-intensive foundries and outsourced the production of its top-tier chips to TSMC. TSMC's technological lead against Intel in the "process race" to manufacture smaller and denser chips subsequently enabled AMD to develop more advanced chips than Intel and sell them at lower prices.
Those catalysts enabled AMD to grow like a weed. In 2020, its revenue rose 45% as its adjusted earnings more than doubled. In 2021, its revenue surged 68% to $16.4 billion as its adjusted earnings more than doubled again. PC sales have been gradually cooling off in a post-lockdown world, but AMD still expects its revenue to grow about 60% this year as its data center and embedded chips offset that cyclical slowdown. Analysts expect its adjusted earnings to grow 57%, which is a jaw-dropping growth rate for a stock that trades at just 23 times forward earnings.
3. Meta Platforms
Facebook's recent transformation into Meta Platforms, which reflects the expansion of its ecosystem into the metaverse with VR devices and software, coincided with the slowdown of its core advertising business. That deceleration, which Meta blamed on Apple's privacy changes on iOS and competition from ByteDance's TikTok, spooked the bulls.
However, the bears often gloss over the fact that Meta's "family" of social media apps -- which includes Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp -- still serves 3.65 billion people (nearly half the world's population) every month. They also probably won't point out that Meta still holds a near-duopoly in the digital advertising market -- with Alphabet's Google -- across many major markets.
But overlooking those strengths would be a mistake. Meta has been tweaking its advertising algorithms to deal with Apple's changes, and it's been investing heavily in new short video content to counter TikTok. Its nascent metaverse ecosystem, which reached about 300,000 monthly active users earlier this year, could also continue to expand as more mainstream consumers buy VR headsets.
Analysts expect Meta's revenue to remain nearly flat this year at $118 billion and for its earnings to decline 25%. But next year, they expect its revenue and earnings to grow 11% and 15%, respectively, as its advertising business stabilizes and it reins in its metaverse-related expenses. If Meta regains its balance, then its stock looks like a screaming bargain right now at 18 times forward earnings.
