Since the stock market bottomed out in March 2020, investors have enjoyed historic gains. It took less than 17 months for the broad-based S&P 500 to double from its bear market low. Furthermore, the widely followed index came close to tripling its long-term average annual return in 2021.
Despite this incredible outperformance, amazing deals remain. Patient investors who buy into innovative companies with clear-cut competitive advantages have a real chance to see their initial investment compound many times over.
If you have cash ready to invest and are willing to let time be your ally, the following four stocks all have the tools to turn $100,000 into $1 million by 2030.
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Teladoc Health
There's no sugarcoating it: telehealth giant Teladoc Health (TDOC 0.08%) was one of 2021's biggest disappointments. After skyrocketing during the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic, concerns about larger-than-expected losses tied to its Livongo Health acquisition, as well as worries about slowing growth in an eventual post-pandemic world, pushed shares more than 70% below their all-time high.
However, investors with time on their side can buy Teladoc Health now and take pride in owning a leading innovator in personalized care.
The easiest way to tell that that telemedicine is here to stay is to look at Teladoc's sales growth prior to the pandemic. In the seven years leading up to the coronavirus outbreak, the company averaged annual sales growth of 74%. That's not a year or two of simply being in the right place at the right time. Sales growth this consistent signals a sustained shift in how treatment is being administered in the U.S.
The great thing about telemedicine is that it provides benefits up and down the treatment chain. It's almost always more convenient for patients, and it can allow physicians easier access to chronically ill patients. This ease of access should result in improved patient outcomes and lower costs for health insurance companies. The latter is particularly important, as it could increase the likelihood that insurers will push for increased telehealth adoption in the years that lie ahead.
What's more, the higher costs associated with Teladoc's buyout of leading applied health signals company Livongo Health won't carry over into its 2022 financial results. This means investors can focus on what's important -- i.e., Livongo's efforts to enroll more chronic-care members in its service.
Teladoc has the solutions and innovation to be one of the fastest-growing healthcare stocks this decade.
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PubMatic
A small-cap growth stock with large-cap aspirations that could realistically 10x investors' money by the turn of the decade is PubMatic (PUBM -0.74%).
PubMatic operates as a cloud-based, sell-side programmatic ad platform. In simple terms, this means PubMatic's solutions handle the optimization of ad placement for its clients, the publishers selling their display space. While publishers do offer some level of input, such as the minimum price they'd be willing to accept for their display space, it's PubMatic's programmatic ad platform that handles everything else.
What makes PubMatic such a no-brainer buy over the long term is the undeniable shift of advertising dollars to digital platforms. According to the company, global digital ad spend is expected to grow by an annual rate of 10% through 2024, with respective compound annual growth rates of 11%, 17%, and 11% for mobile, video, and connected TV (CTV)/over-the-top programmatic ads through mid-decade.
However, PubMatic's growth rate has consistently more than doubled industrywide estimates. In the third quarter alone, mobile and omnichannel video, which includes CTV, grew by 64% from the year-ago period. This digital omnichannel ad growth is precisely why PubMatic has reported four consecutive quarters of organic growth of at least 50%.
With the shift to digital ad spending picking up steam, PubMatic looks to be the best name to own in the programmatic ad space.
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Ping Identity Holdings
Another fast-paced small-cap stock with the ability to turn $100,000 into $1 million by 2030 is cybersecurity company Ping Identity (PING).
Cybersecurity is what I believe will be the safest sustainable double-digit growth trend throughout the decade. With more businesses than ever moving their data into the cloud during the pandemic, demand for third-party solutions to safeguard this information has skyrocketed. Since hackers and robots don't take a day off, the solutions provided by Ping Identity and its peers have effectively become basic-need services.
As its name implies, Ping's cloud-based and artificial intelligence-driven platform is primarily focused on identity verification. It's particularly effective when layered with on-premises solutions to assist with continuous verifications, risk assessment, and authorization (all areas where on-premises solutions may come up short).
What makes Ping Identity such an incredible deal is the company's temporary underperformance during the initial stages of the pandemic. The uncertainty of the pandemic led some of its customers to choose shorter time frames for their term-based licenses in 2020. While that was bad news for Ping's short-term revenue growth, it didn't slow the company's annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth, which has averaged in the mid-to-high teens. Since nearly all of Ping's revenue is derived from subscriptions, ARR is a much better indicator of Ping's overall health.
Ping Identity is profitable and steadily shifting clients to its high-margin software-as-a-service cybersecurity solutions over time. That's a recipe for success.
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Fastly
A fourth fast-growing company that can turn $100,000 into $1 million for investors by 2030 is edge cloud computing stock Fastly (FSLY -0.87%). The company is perhaps best known for being a content delivery network (i.e., it expedites the delivery of content to end users while maintaining/bolstering network security).
Similar to Teladoc, Fastly was creamed after the mid-February 2021 peak in growth stocks. Wall Street has been concerned with Fastly's wider-than-expected losses tied to higher head count and increased marketing expenses. Additionally, Fastly faced a backlash in June after a brief outage on its network disrupted service for a number of popular clients.
Although an outage isn't good news, this temporary disruption is now in the rearview mirror. More importantly, the outage hasn't cost Fastly its core clients. Third-quarter operating data showed sequential increases in enterprise customer count, average enterprise customer spend, and net retention rates.
Fastly's allure also has to do with its potential role in the metaverse. The metaverse is the next iteration of the internet, designed to let users interact with 3D virtual environments. One of the biggest challenges of the metaverse will be reducing latency and eliminating any lag following decisions or movements made in virtual worlds. Fastly's network should be leaned on heavily as the metaverse takes shape in the years to come.
With an adjusted gross margin that's consistently come in between 57% and 62%, Fastly is a good bet to net patient investors a whopper of a return over the long run.
