Being in the market hasn't been easy of late. Each time it looks like stocks are starting to recover, wham! They're up-ended, falling to even lower lows. End result? The S&P 500 is down 24% year to date -- and thanks to Friday's shellacking, it's back within sight of yet another 52-week low.
This isn't the norm, though. In fact, this weakness is an exception to the long, upward trend of the market, and so it's an opportunity for investors to scoop up some great stocks at a discount. Here are three names to consider that could end up rewarding you well, even if you've only got $1,000 to invest in them right now.
Procter & Gamble
For a company that sells must-haves like detergent, diapers, and toothpaste, Procter & Gamble (PG -1.74%) shareholders have to be more than a little disappointed in the stock's 24% tumble from its April high. Perhaps worse, as of last week they're seemingly still in a freefall.
Blame inflation, mostly. The consumer goods business is a relatively low-margin one. Soaring fuel and raw materials prices put even more pressure on this already-thin profitability.
The doubt driving this stock lower, however, is a bit misguided for one overarching reason. That is, Procter & Gamble is by far the world's biggest household products company (as measured by revenue), and as such has incredible leverage and deep pockets. And it uses both.
Case in point: While it's not true for every single year, in most years P&G is the world's biggest advertiser. For the fiscal year ended in June, the company shelled out $7.9 billion on media-based promotion, in line with previous years' advertising outlays. This is one of the key reasons its brand names like Tide, Gillette, and Crest seem so subtly top-of-mind when you're making your shopping list.
As for leverage, this is largely a function of scale. P&G is often one of a retailer's biggest single wholesalers, which not only allows the company to offer large-quantity discounts, but also means retailers depend heavily on Procter & Gamble's entire family of familiar, well-loved brands to drive foot traffic.
P&G may never dish out double-digit sales growth. The stock's big pullback this year, however, dismisses the reliability with which the company can dish out a steady cadence of single-digit growth.
O'Reilly Automotive
If you've not priced a new car lately, get ready for some sticker shock. Based on data from Kelley Blue Book, Cox Automotive says the average cost of a new car sold in the United States was a whopping record of $48,301 in August. These sky-high prices were already prompting people to rethink the purchase of a new vehicle. Soaring interest rates only further motivate them to keep their current vehicles in good working order instead.
Of course, increasingly expensive automobiles are hardly a recent phenomenon. Cox's data also suggests the average cost of a new car has grown steadily over the course of the past decade. This trend is a key reason why the average age of cars regularly driven on U.S. roads has risen from a little over nine years old in 2002, to slightly more than 11 years old in 2012, to more than 12 years old now, according to numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation. People have to keep their automobiles running longer.
There's opportunity rooted in this growing unaffordability, though. That is, it translates into reliable demand for auto parts stores like O'Reilly Automotive (ORLY -0.23%).
And O'Reilly's got the results to back up the claim. Namely, not once in the past 10 years has its quarterly revenue failed to grow from year-ago levels, including the second quarter of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic effectively shut down, well, everything.
There are higher-growth names out there to be sure, but there are very few names capable of growing as much and as reliably as O'Reilly Automotive.
Amazon
Finally, add Amazon (AMZN -0.41%) to your list of stocks that could end up earning you a fortune, particularly if you jump in while it's trading at nearly 40% below November's peak.
Yes, the inflation bug has bitten Amazon as well. Its e-commerce operations were unprofitable in the first and second quarters of this year, in fact, thanks to a combination of higher freight, payroll, and product costs. But don't jump to conclusions about Amazon being past its prime, even if these costs aren't fully curbed in the future.
See, Amazon isn't an e-commerce company that also happens to operate a cloud computing arm. It's a cloud computing business and an advertising platform. It just also happens to sell goods online, as a means to an end. In relatively normal, pre-pandemic 2019, more than 60% of the organization's operating profit was generated by Amazon Web Services, and that proportion has only expanded since then.
At the same time, the company generated $31 billion worth of high-margin advertising revenue last year, monetizing the 200 million or so different people who collectively visit the Amazon.com website more than 2 billion times per month.
And even though this advertising initiative is relatively new, it's still making serious waves. It's swiping digital advertising market share from powerhouses like Meta's Facebook and Alphabet's Google, for instance, at least in the United States (which is the most important market for all these players). It's conceivable that this advertising business could become the core profit driver of its online shopping operation, offsetting any effect of higher operating costs.