With the recent surge in technology ever advancing us into the future, stocks are increasingly worth looking into and investing with.
Stocks have always been an excellent way to invest your money, and range from low-risk to high-risk when it comes to profit and loss. The stock market is a sector that's ever-changing and for this reason, hangs in a delicate balance from moment to moment.
However, there are ways to predict their progress – but there are no guarantees. All you can do is take a risk and hope for the best.
Let’s take a look at our list of the top five stocks poised for a breakout in 2019.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
While AMD has its rough days like every other stock, the general turnaround of Advanced Micro Devices is beginning to indicate great things and tangible results.
CEO Lisa Su is largely to thank for this, because of her ability to seek out the right opportunities while also staying disciplined when it comes to the absolute bottom line.
You’d never guess that AMD has been around since the 1960’s – these days, it looks like nothing more than a scrappy startup. However, in its most recent quarter, revenues jumped a whopping 53% to $1.76 billion.
The enormous datacenter market is the primary driver behind this success. AMD has also had help with its EPYC processing server from big deal companies like HP Enterprise and Cisco. It also helps that one of its main rivals, Intel, has had a bit of a fallback recently, because of its delay in releasing new chipsets.
Bear in mind that Intel currently has 99% of the market when it comes to data centers. However, this could also be seen as AMD's next target.
Needless to say, Wall Street is getting excited about this ‘new’ up and comer. One of the main reasons for this? That the EPYC is currently poised for promising strong gains.
Cloudera (CLDR)
Back earlier this year, the growth engine of CLDR stalled, and the company lost more than 40% on its stocks.
However, this company has a strong team backing it up that swiftly moved in for some serious damage control. One of the main things that was done to turn things around was an overhaul of the sales team – and it seems to have worked.
In their second quarter this year, their revenue rose by 23% to $110.3 million, beating what Wall Street was looking for at $107.7 million. While there was an 8 cent loss, this was much better than the predicted loss of 15 cents. Additionally, CLDR has increased its full-year guidance to $440-450 million, an increase from $435-445 million.
Now, for the competition. You’re looking at the likes of Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, who as we know aren’t small fish to fry. However, there’s plenty of wriggle room as the size of the market is accommodating enough for multiple players.
Besides, it would seem that CLDR has an ace up their sleeves with strategies like disrupting conventional data warehousing, which appears to be entirely in line with the future of machine learning, cloud platforms, and artificial intelligence.
Okta
Okta is a company with stocks reflecting the next generation, dealing with the development of identity services for both great and small enterprises. The primary goal with this is to help secure real access to critical information. The platform itself has over 5,500 integrations and 5,100 existing customers.
Okta has also been showing a strong movement in its growth. In its latest growth, the company completely destroyed Wall Street expectations. Revenue soared by an incredible 57% to $94.6 million, compared to the forecast of $84.8 million.
The full-year guidance of the company was also raised from $372-$375 million up to $353-$357 million. One significant cause for this has been the company’s ability to land a number of large customers. In fact, during the past year alone, Okta has been able to witness a 55% increase in customers who are generating regular subscriptions of $100,000 or more. This is all thanks to their ‘land and expand' strategy.
Despite all this, it looks like the opportunity for Okta to shine on the stock market stage is still in its inception phase. CEO Todd McKinnon says that there is a critical market tailwind in favor of Okta because every major organization is moving to the cloud.
Every company is becoming more of a technology company, which naturally leads to concerns about security. Identity in this mass of technology is becoming more critical, which bodes well for a company like Okta.
Anadarko
Breaking away from technology for our last two picks, let’s take a look at an energy company.
Anadarko is a petroleum company that is poised for a big year ahead. In fact, it’s nearing break-out level, which means that it’s one to watch. Shares have risen to as much as $73.30. If the stock does increase, it's poised for approximately 20.4% up to a maximum of $85.00. If the stock were to fall, the upward sloping trend line and support level would reduce it to a manageable $64.50.
However, it’s worth noting despite these numbers that the RSI, or relative strength index has been trending higher for a year and a half now since April 2017.
While its levels sitting at 70 are currently overbought, it could still continue to rise. This is because the RSI has reached these types of levels three times now since 2017, and when it did, so it didn't slump. Instead, it consolidated sideways before quickly resuming its upward trend again.
Noble
Noble is a company whose stocks have been the underdog for the last few years. However, they have recently broken out and crossed above $33.00.
This breakout was again then re-tested with positives results at the beginning of May, rising to $37.50 since then. The stock appears to be out of the gate with a clear path all the way to $41.20, with a rise of roughly 12% from its current existing stock value.
No levels of strong resistance have been seen until then. Currently, this stock is at its overbought level of roughly 70, which suggest a prediction of consolidation before making a move that takes it even higher.
Final Thoughts
When choosing to invest and put your money where your mouth is, the less risky the stock, the better.
However, sometimes it's also okay to please your appetite for risk and root for the stocks which you think will have the highest payoff.
At the end of the day, the key to investing is doing your research and knowing which stocks are poised for positive growth as we see out 2018 and bring in the new year. Start with our picks for five stocks we believe to have firm predictions behind them, and you'll have a bit of confidence about the risks you choose to take.