If you're in the market for stocks that can drive your portfolio higher in 2023, there are more than a few viable options at the moment. Soaring inflation and rising interest rates to tame that inflation applied a lot of downward pressure on growth stocks across the board this year. Shares of the Vanguard Growth ETF have fallen nearly 30% from the peak they reached in late 2021.
Analysts on Wall Street are keenly aware that every bear market in history has been wiped away by a subsequent recovery period. With this in mind, they've predicted strong market gains for businesses that are in much better condition than their beaten-down stock prices would suggest. Here's what they have to say about three stocks that could rise between 50.2% and 59.6% in 2023.
Image source: Getty Images.
Amazon
Shares of Amazon (AMZN -1.64%) are down by more than half from the peak they reached back in 2021. Analysts who follow this giant of the e-commerce and cloud service industries think it can recover some of those losses in 2023. The consensus price target on the stock at the moment suggests it could climb 53.6% once the rest of the market sees Amazon's businesses in the same light as investment bankers.
Amazon shares have been getting battered all year in response to a bottom line that made a wrong turn and landed in negative territory earlier this year. It turns out the company overreacted to a temporary surge in demand for order fulfillment services driven by the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ongoing transition away from brick-and-mortar retail and toward e-commerce means it's just a matter of time before demand catches up to Amazon's current capacity for warehousing and delivering goods. In the meantime, the company's cloud services operation will pick up the slack and then some. Operating profits from Amazon Web Services (AWS) rose 10% year over year to $5.4 billion in the third quarter.
Duolingo
Duolingo's (DUOL -1.88%) stock price has tumbled about 64% from its all-time peak in 2021 but Wall Street expects a major recovery to begin in 2023. The average price target on the stock right now represents a 50.2% premium.
This company is named after the language-learning application it operates, and that application is rapidly gaining popularity. The number of daily active users soared 51% year over to 14.9 million during the third quarter.
Analysts who follow Duolingo aren't just impressed with the application's popularity. It turns out the company is especially good at converting free users into subscribers willing to pay for premium features. There were 3.7 million paid subscribers on Duolingo at the end of the third quarter, which was 68% more than the company reported a year earlier.
The company is still reporting net losses, but perhaps not for much longer. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) reached a positive $2.1 million in the third quarter.
SoFi Technologies
SoFi Technologies (SOFI 0.26%) stock has fallen about 70.3% in 2022. Analysts on Wall Street who follow the bank think there's just too much pessimism and expect a big rebound to begin soon. The consensus price target on SoFi is 59.6% above the stock's recent closing price.
SoFi runs an all-digital bank that's experiencing softening demand for loans, and it's easy to understand why business has decelerated. Interest rates have soared from next to nothing at the beginning of the year to a target range above 4% at the moment.
In addition to a consumer-facing business, SoFi operates a technology platform called Galileo. Large digital banks and enterprise clients from outside the finance sector use Galileo's application programming interface (API) to set up customer accounts, payment cards, and more. SoFi's technology platform enabled 124 million accounts at the end of September, which was 40% more than a year earlier.
SoFi stock currently trades at around 37 times the midpoint of management's adjusted EBITDA estimate for 2022. With a consumer banking operation and a business-to-business technology platform growing by leaps and bounds, SoFi has a great chance to grow into its valuation and provide market-beating returns over the long run.
