Even for veteran investors, trying to narrow down the choices of which stocks to put some new money to work each month can be overwhelming. There are a lot of solid companies out there, but if you want to grow that money at rates that are much better than a typical index fund, you need to buy growth stocks.

Last year's market sell-off is a great opportunity to buy shares of high-growth companies like Cloudflare (NET 1.44%) and The Trade Desk (TTD 1.67%). These companies have a history of regularly reporting high revenue growth, which is a key indicator of future returns. 

Here's why Cloudflare and The Trade Desk are great stocks to consider parking $500 in each for at least the next five years.

Cloudflare

You probably use Cloudflare without realizing it. The company's network service handles an estimated 20% to 25% of all web traffic, including for many large companies. 

As businesses shift their on-premise hardware and software systems to the cloud, there is a growing need for a simple solution that handles complex network challenges and internet security, all from one provider. Cloudflare provides a cloud-based network service that offers website and application security and helps companies speed up their web performance.

Between 2020 and 2022, revenue grew at a 50% compound annual rate to reach $975 million, which is earned through subscriptions to its services. It ended the first quarter with 168,000 paying customers, but millions of customers use its free offering. 

Cloudflare continues to expand its network service products to pad its top-line growth. For example, in the recent quarter a large media company, which has been a customer since 2017, adopted the company's Zero Trust security product. which replaced two of Cloudflare's competitors. This highlights a competitive advantage for Cloudflare in handling complex needs with superior performance over competing solutions.

The stock is trading 71% off its previous highs,  as last quarter's revenue growth of 37% shows weakness in light of companies scrutinizing their spending budgets in this challenging economic environment. 

Still, this is a great buying opportunity, as the content delivery network market is expected to grow 23% per year through 2030, according to Grand View Research. Wall Street doesn't like to see slowing growth, but that is inevitable as the business grows larger, especially in the context of a choppy business environment with high inflation and interest rates.

Most importantly, Cloudflare is continuing to grow faster than the industry. It also reported positive trailing-12-month free cash flow of $38 million in the first quarter, which is a reversal of the negative free cash flow it reported over the last few years. 

As the company continues to scale and report growing free cash flow over the next decade, the stock will follow suit and deliver market-beating returns consistent with its above-average revenue growth.

The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk is another top growth stock that is on the verge of delivering market-beating returns in the years to come. It is a leading digital advertising platform that helps companies manage and optimize their campaigns across a number of online media channels in different formats.

The global advertising market is massive, but the main opportunity for Trade Desk is the shift to digital advertising on connected TV platforms -- a market estimated at over $20 billion and is expected to double by 2027, according to Statista. 

The growth in connected TV advertising is just a small slice of the broader digital advertising market, where programmatic advertising is being more widely used to automate the ad-buying process, in which The Trade Desk is emerging as a leader. The programmatic ad market was estimated to be worth $418 billion in 2021 and expected to grow to $724 billion by 2026. 

Big tech giants like Meta Platforms and Alphabet's Google lead the digital ad market, but where The Trade Desk differentiates itself is that it doesn't buy and hold ad inventory to resell to its customers. Trade Desk merely operates the ad-buying platform that advertisers use to buy and manage their campaigns. In return, The Trade Desk charges a small fee of the total ad spending on its platform. 

Revenue has increased from $661 million in 2019 to over $1.5 billion last year. In the first quarter of 2023, it continued to grow faster than its competitors, with revenue up 21% year over year. 

This is very impressive growth in a weak advertising market. Customer retention has remained strong at 95%, which the company has sustained for nine consecutive quarters.  The Trade Desk is seeing more companies adopt its new Unified ID 2.0 product, which allows companies to target their ads at the right audience without sacrificing individual privacy.

The Trade Desk is winning a lucrative position of the digital advertising market. It has a consistent history of reporting a profit, with free cash flow reaching $497 million over the last year. The stock isn't cheap, but investors should realize a market-beating return as The Trade Desk continues to post strong growth.