Retiring as a millionaire may not mean what it once did with rising costs for healthcare, housing, and college education, but it's still a worthy goal.
Depending on your supplemental income sources like Social Security or a pension, where you plan to live, and your own expectations for a comfortable life, $1 million could be enough to get you there.
If you have $200,000 to invest, that's a great start. These three stocks can help you get to $1 million over the next decade.
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1. Roku
Roku (ROKU -10.29%) is already on the rebound from a sharp sell-off in 2022 as the digital ad market ground to a halt and the company overspent on growth, leading to several rounds of layoffs this year.
However, even after the stock has gained more than 150% this year, there's plenty of room for gains as it's still down nearly 80% from its pandemic-era peak. In fact, Roku has many of the qualities you'd like to see in a potential multibagger. It's the leader in a growing, disruptive market as it's the top streaming-distribution platform with around 75 million active accounts, and it still has a relatively small market cap at just $15 billion. Gaining ten times its current value over the next decade doesn't seem unreasonable as streaming takes over linear TV, and valuations for a streamer like Netflix is already above $200 billion, by comparison. That's a different kind of company from Roku, but shows that there's already a significant market opportunity in streaming, and it's only getting bigger.
Over the coming years, Roku should benefit significantly from the emergence of ad-based streaming television as major streamers like Netflix, Disney, and Amazon have all recently launched ad-based tiers, and Roku typically takes 30% of ad inventory from its streaming partners. Additionally, the company is innovating with its own branded TVs and expanding into new markets like Latin America.
The company returned to adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) profitability faster than expected in the third quarter, and the business should be highly scalable as it matures, meaning there's a lot of room for margins to expand.
If you're looking to build a million-dollar retirement portfolio, Roku looks like a great stock to bet on.
2. ACM Research
The semiconductor sector has boomed this year thanks to excitement over new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the chips needed to fuel them. While Nvidia has been the most notable winner thus far in the AI chip race, one small-cap chip stock worth paying attention to is ACM Research (ACMR -4.42%).
The company manufactures semiconductor wafer-cleaning equipment, making it something of a picks-and-shovels play in the chip sector, and as demand for semiconductors increases with the boom in AI, so should demand for its equipment.
ACM Research continues to deliver solid growth, with revenue up 26% in its most recent quarter and shipments rising 31%. The company also has attractive profit margins with a generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) operating margin of 20% in its most recent quarter, and its gross margin is expanding, giving it more money to invest in research and development and other growth initiatives.
The company continues to expand its product selection, recently launching the ULTRA C v Vacuum Cleaning Tool, which was developed in collaboration with several key customers, and it said it received a purchase order from a major Chinese manufacturer, which it expects to deliver in 2024.
Finally, ACM is also well-priced at a price-to-earnings ratio of just 12, and the company is valued at a market cap of just $1 billion, meaning the stock could easily be a multibagger if it capitalizes on the AI boom.
The stock has already made early investors a nice return, jumping more than 700% since its 2017 IPO. Considering its small size, rapid growth, and low valuation, there's a good chance it can do it again.
3. Soundhound AI
Pure-play AI stocks are hard to find on the market these days, but one of the more intriguing of the bunch is Soundhound AI (SOUN 5.77%), a specialist in voice recognition and voice-to-text technology. Although its technology is relatively new, Soundhound has been around since 2005. Soundhound's age is actually a good thing, as it's spent years refining and improving its technology. The company was once a competitor to Shazam, known for identifying songs, but those same skills come in handy for voice recognition and text-to-speech. The company itself says that its industry has "significant technical barriers to entry" that will limit new competition in the near term.
Soundhound is the company that ensures that Snapchat's social media app, Netflix's streaming service, and Stellantis' vehicles all understand you when you talk. The company has recently forged into the restaurant industry, teaming up with restaurant-software platform Toast, and partnered with online ordering specialist Olo to make its technology available in the 77,000 locations using Olo. It also launched a new feature for restaurant employees called Employee Assist, allowing them to just use their voice to get information instead of searching through a manual.
Soundhound is still small, but its growth rate is starting to ramp up as excitement about AI builds. Revenue was up 52% sequentially but 13% year over year in Q3 to $13.3 million, and it sees growth accelerating into Q4, calling for $16 million to $20 million in revenue, up 89% at the midpoint from a year ago, and it expects positive adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA).
The company also has a healthy bookings backlog of $342 million, which should help drive revenue higher over the coming years. Given its lack of GAAP profits, Soundhound is a risky stock and it could face increasing competition, but this could be a pivotal moment for the company as more industries like restaurants embrace voice AI. If it can maintain a strong growth rate, the stock could grow to multiples beyond its current market cap of $528 million.
Turning $200,000 into $1 million in a decade isn't easy, requiring a compound annual growth rate of 17.5% from these stocks. However, they all have a track record of growing revenue faster than that, have reasonable valuations, and have large markets to penetrate. With the right mix of growth stocks, growing your portfolio by 5x over the next decade is achievable.
