The stock market tech sell-off in 2022 has been painful. It's no fun to watch your holdings lose value over and over, often for macroeconomic reasons that seem far removed from the operation of the companies you own.
But there is a big, juicy upside to these price drops. Deep-discount sales let you buy the stuff you wanted or needed anyway, without digging too deeply into your wallet. The same is true for stock market dips. Right now, lots of great companies will do more than just fine in the long run, but their stock prices were thrown out with Wall Street's bathwater anyway.
It's high time to take advantage of these bargain-bin discounts. Below, I'll show you two household-name tech stocks whose shares are far too cheap at the moment. You should look into grabbing them before the next bull market kicks off.
Cheap tech stock No. 1: Alphabet
Here's a fun fact: It's actually impossible to find a Wall Street analyst who follows Alphabet (GOOG -2.40%) (GOOGL -2.29%) and who doesn't love the stock.
I'm not kidding: 17 analyst firms provide ratings of the Google parent's stock. All of them have issued buy ratings with an average target price of $148 per share, 56% upside from current share prices. Even the least-bullish stock researcher in this group keeps a $115 price target on it, pointing to at least 21% upside.
By and large, investors and market makers agree that Alphabet's stock chart should turn upward in the long run. Only 0.3% of the Class C shares (GOOG, without voting rights) are currently borrowed by short-selling pessimists. For Alphabet's Class A stock (GOOGL, with one vote per share), that ratio stands at a modest 0.4%. The negative bets are running well below their long-term averages.
It's hard to find critics and short-sellers for Alphabet's stocks at least partly because shares are already at fire-sale prices. Both stock classes are down by 36.8% over the last year, far below the S&P 500 (^GSPC -1.18%) historically bearish price drop of 16%.
Alphabet's shares are mildly undervalued, trading at roughly 19 times trailing earnings and 20 times free cash flows. These valuation ratios would be comfortable for classic value stocks. Alphabet is normally nowhere near these modest ratios, because its online search and advertising business generates prodigious top-line growth over long periods. Stocks with Alphabet's growth profile tend to carry much higher valuation ratios.
For example, the average growth rate for the last five years stands at 23%. Compare and contrast that performance trend with more-conventional growth stocks such as Walmart or Johnson & Johnson, and you'll find that these calcified veterans struggle to break into double-digit growth percentages.
And that's in the midst of a severe downturn in the digital advertising market. Ad-spot buyers are tightening their sales and marketing belts in a time of economic crisis, which limits the ad market's overall growth and financial health. Yet Alphabet relentlessly posts positive revenue growth even in tough times like these.
If the company can keep a stiff top-line lip during this market crunch, imagine what it will do when the crisis lifts and clients start pouring orders into the online advertising sector.
Alphabet is one of those stocks you can buy once, stick under your pillow, and sleep tight while the company and stock deliver market-beating gains for years and decades to come. The growth story gets even sweeter if you buy in while share prices are low, as they are right now.
Buying stock in great companies at reasonable prices is ripping a page right out of master investor Warren Buffett's playbook. I suggest you try it.
Cheap tech stock No. 2: Amazon
Shares of Amazon (AMZN -2.94%) have fallen 48% in the last 52 weeks. The e-commerce and cloud computing company faced difficult year-over-year comparisons in recent quarters, as the fresh financial figures matched up against the online shopping and cloud computing hypergrowth seen in the darkest days of the COVID-19 crisis. Sales increased by just 3% in the first quarter of 2022. That was very nearly the lowest reading in Amazon's history, exceeded only by a dead-flat year-over-year revenue comparison in the third quarter of 2001.
That multiyear record goes back a long way. You know what else Amazon hasn't seen in many years? A price-to-sales ratio of less than 2. But here we are, with the option of buying Amazon shares at just 1.9 times trailing revenue. This time, we're reaching all the way back to January 2015.
In other words, Amazon's stock is historically cheap when you measure it against the company's rampant sales growth. The recent slowdown was caused by the aforementioned back end of the coronavirus crisis, plus a slew of macroeconomic challenges such as steep inflation and unhelpful currency exchange trends.
When these marketwide issues fade away, Amazon will still be standing, champing at the bit to return to its usual high-octane growth rates. At the same time, it will benefit from lower shipping costs as transportation systems around the nation and the world straighten out their kinks, too. If the top-line gains of the recovery are impressive, the bottom-line profit gains should be downright mind-boggling.
Eventually, stock prices should follow suit. When they do, you'll be glad you picked up some shares on the cheap.
