The start of 2022 reminded every investor that the law of gravity still rules when it comes to stocks. The S&P 500 had its worst six-month period in over 50 years between January and June, losing more than a fifth of its value and entering bear market territory, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite plunged more than 30% from the highs hit back in November.
The sharp dive that growth stocks experienced during the period came from fear of a recession hitting the economy as investors sought seemingly safer places to put their money. Many of those former highfliers are still nursing significant losses, but some have made a sharp rebound and, though still severely below where they started the year, offer investors a chance to scoop up stocks at discounted prices.
Of course, price alone is no reason to buy any stock. Sometimes companies are cheap for a reason. It's only because their businesses still offer significant growth opportunities that investors should consider buying this pair of red-hot growth stocks and then hold onto them for years to come.
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The Trade Desk
Programmatic ad-buying platform The Trade Desk (TTD -1.59%) might not fit the picture investors have of a barn-burner stock as shares are down 30% in 2022 and off more than 40% from their 52-week highs on worries a slowing economy is denting digital ad buying. But there's more than just hope that the rebound in The Trade Desk's stock can continue.
Sales continue to race higher, even if not at the same previous breakneck pace, because not only is The Trade Desk attracting more customers to its platform, but its clients continue to spend more money with it than they did previously. And they keep coming back to the platform, allowing it to achieve a 95% customer retention rate, just as it has for over seven consecutive years.
There are exciting new opportunities now for advertising as well. The decision by Netflix, for example, to offer a new lower-cost subscriber tier that features ads opens up a large avenue of growth for The Trade Desk. The company didn't directly win the Netflix account but it already has a strong relationship with the streaming service along with Microsoft, which is handling the sales component of the advertising.
It likely won't mean much at first, but CEO Jeff Green said in the company's most recent earnings call that "it's less important to me about the role that Trade Desk plays with Netflix in the crawl phase than it does in the walk and the run phase."
The digital ad market has a long runway of growth while the connected television market continues to provide a tailwind. The Trade Desk's stock might not be cheap based on traditional valuation metrics (it goes for 56 times next year's earnings estimates and 65 times the free cash flow it produces), but because the markets it serves have significant expansion potential, its discounted stock price makes for a fine entry point for a growth stock like this.
Snowflake
Snowflake (SNOW 0.82%) should be on a growth stock investor's buy list because businesses moving data to the cloud is no longer a luxury but virtually a necessity these days. The cloud-data warehousing company is poised to capture much of the business.
Snowflake's technology is built on top of various popular cloud services, so it allows businesses to share their data even if they're not using the same infrastructure service providers.
It started the year serving 241 of the Fortune 500 companies and 488 of the Global 2000 companies, but expects that number to grow as more large customers upgrade their aging IT infrastructure. Total customers stood at 6,808 at the end of the second quarter, with 246 of them having trailing-12-month product revenue greater than $1 million.
Product revenue was up 83% in the second quarter compared with last year. The company now expects to generate as much as almost $1.92 billion for the full fiscal year, an increase from its prior upper-end guidance of $1.9 billion in sales. Dollar-based net retention rate, or the annual recurring revenue of existing clients compared with that of the same customers a year ago, was 171% this quarter, showing existing customers are continuing to increase their business with Snowflake.
Its stock has bounced 61% higher off the lows it hit in June, but it's still down 47% in 2022. The cloud stock also has a massive opportunity for its business to grow, so it's worth adding Snowflake to the buy-and-hold portion of your portfolio.
