This year has been a disappointment to say the least for investors. After a 13-year bull-market run driven primarily by the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100, growth stocks have tanked this year, and the index is down 30% in 2022.
Yet for every bear market that comes along -- and such corrections do occur with regularity -- a rally follows behind, eventually wiping away all the losses and going on to new heights. So it becomes a waiting game for patient investors who know to hang on through the tough times to get to better days tomorrow.
However, corrections also provide opportunities to pick up good companies with excellent growth potential that have been beaten down. Stand out tech stocks Broadcom (AVGO -1.41%) and Datadog (DDOG -1.07%) have lost at least 20% of their value this year, but Wall Street still expects them to grow some 50% or more this year and beyond.
Let's take a closer look at why each of these tech stocks are worth considering heading before we head into 2023.
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1. Broadcom
Broadcom is poised to benefit from the demand for and continued growth of high-speed networking and demand for public cloud services. Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya has said he expects demand to triple for such services by 2026, hitting $300 billion, even if there is near-term pressure on cloud-capital spending.
Broadcom's major end markets include networking, storage, broadband, and wireless, which itself sets up a major expansion catalyst. Over the next few years, the ongoing rollout of wireless-infrastructure upgrades to support 5G networks should be a big inflection point for the chipmaker.
What investors can rightfully admire about Broadcom is its prodigious cash-generating capabilities. In the third quarter, it produced $4.3 billion worth of free cash flow for margins of 51%. Free cash flow is the money left over after a company pays its bills; it can be used to further invest in the business or enhance shareholder returns.
Broadcom returned $3.2 billion to investors last quarter, with $1.7 billion coming from dividends and $1.5 billion from stock buybacks. It has been growing its dividend at a compounded annual rate of 24% over the past three years and 32% over the last five. Broadcom reports earnings soon, and investors should expect another increase as well. The current dividend yields a healthy 3.1% annually.
Wall Street forecasts the chipmaker will grow earnings at least 15% annually for the next five years. It has a one-year price target of as much as $775 per share, a 47% gain from where it trades today.
Image source: Getty Images.
2. Datadog
Cloud-based application monitoring and security company Datadog is another stock that is ready for a bull run. After all, businesses that had been steadily shifting their data into the cloud prior to the pandemic kicked it into overdrive during it.
Even so, as noted with Broadcom, spending by businesses for infrastructure enhancements is pressured by inflation, high interest rates, and a return to a more normalized state of affairs for consumers and businesses after the pandemic frenzy. The exponential growth of cloud offerings has eased up as resumption of in-person activities returns. Look at it as a pause rather than a cessation, yet Datadog is still growing.
In the third quarter, revenue grew 61% as the number of customers with more than $100,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) increased 44% to 2,600. Datadog has a number of clients with ARR in excess of $1 million. It's also seeing its customers respond to the numerous products it offers: 80% purchase two or more products; 40% use four or more; and 16% use six or more.
That comes from Datadog's significant research and development (R&D) expenditures, some $362 million in 2022, up 67% from last year. As more incremental revenue comes from existing customers increasing how much they spend with Datadog each quarter, it can devote more resources to R&D to create even more services to upsell to them, creating a virtuous circle of growth.
Datadog has become consistently profitable and enjoys significant margin expansion, though the market has struck down its stock roughly 58% this year. Wall Street anticipates it will grow earnings at an incredible 47% a year long term and sees stock-price appreciation of as much as 186% from current levels. This seems an excellent opportunity to ride a bull run higher.
