AI, Cryptocurrency Top Tech Stocks: AppLovin, MicroStrategy, Palantir, Nvidia

Artificial intelligence is still an abstract concept for many average consumers, unsure of how it will change their lives. But there is no question whether companies are finding value in it.

Some of the biggest winners of this year’s stock market rally, which saw the Nasdaq rise 33% and other U.S. indices post double-digit gains, are directly related to rapid advances in AI. chip maker nvidia It’s one of those things, but you’re not alone.

Another standout topic that led to outstanding performance this year was cryptocurrency. Starting with the launch of a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund in January, cryptocurrencies have had a great year in 2024, which culminated in the election victory of Donald Trump, who was heavily funded by the cryptocurrency industry. A number of stocks related to cryptocurrencies have seen significant gains.

With four trading days left this year, here are the five best-performing U.S. technology stocks in 2024 among companies worth more than $5 billion.

AppLovin It started the year with a market capitalization of about $13 billion and is best known for its investments in a collection of mobile game studios that produced titles such as “Woody Block Puzzle,” “Clockmaker” and “Bingo Story.”

As the year ended, AppLovin’s valuation soared past $110 billion, putting its valuation above $20 billion. Starbucks, intel and Airbnb. As of Tuesday’s close, AppLovin shares were up 758% this year, far outperforming all other technology companies.

AppLovin went public in 2021 and was caught up in the online gaming craze in the COVID-19 era, but the business is now focused on surging revenues from online advertising and AI advancements.

Last year, AppLovin released an updated 2.0 version of its advertising search engine called AXON. This version helps the company deliver more targeted ads to gaming apps it owns and is also used by studios that license the technology. Software platform revenue in the third quarter increased 66% to $835 million, exceeding the overall growth rate of 39%.

Net income for the quarter soared 300%, boosting the company’s profit margin from 12.6% to 36.3% over the year.

With a net worth exceeding $10 billion, AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi is even more excited about what’s to come. On the company’s earnings call in November, Foroughi praised a test e-commerce project that would allow the company to serve targeted ads in games.

“It’s the best product we’ve launched in my years, it’s the fastest growing, but it’s still in the pilot phase,” he said.

The unthinkable after rising 346% in 2023 MicroStrategy’s Looking for other equipment. But it was.

The company’s stock price has surged 467% this year, fueled by a Bitcoin-buying strategy that made founder Michael Saylor a cryptocurrency cult hero.

In mid-2020, the company announced plans to begin purchasing Bitcoin. Up until that point, MicroStrategy was a mid-tier business intelligence software provider, but it has since used its ever-rising stock price as a way to sell stock, raise debt, and buy more coins, purchasing more than 444,000 bitcoins.

Currently, he is the world’s fourth-largest Bitcoin holder, after Satoshi Nakamoto, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, and cryptocurrency exchange Binance, and his holdings are worth close to $44 billion. MicroStrategy’s market capitalization has grown from about $1.1 billion when it was a software company to $80 billion today.

Although the rallies had been going on for a long time before November, Trump’s election victory last month added fuel. Since then, the stock price has risen 57% and Bitcoin has risen about 44%. Although Trump once called Bitcoin a “scam,” he was the industry’s preferred choice in this election and received major support from some major companies, including: coinbase.

“With a red sweep, Bitcoin will surge with a tailwind and the rest of the digital assets will also start to surge,” Saylor told CNBC immediately after the election. He said that while Bitcoin remains a ‘safe transaction’ in the cryptocurrency industry, the overall digital asset industry will see a surge as a ‘digital asset framework’ is put in place for the wider cryptocurrency market.

Palantir In 2024, the stock price showed a significant rise of 380%. One of its best performances came last month, when the software company raised its revenue forecast a day before the presidential election.

The company, which sells data analytics tools to defense agencies, hit its 2024 target with fourth-quarter guidance that significantly exceeded analysts’ estimates. Palantir also topped the list of third-quarter results, with CEO Alex Karp declaring on the earnings call, “We absolutely blew this quarter, driven by unrelenting demand for AI that just won’t slow down.”

The stock soared 23% on the earnings report and surged another 8.6% the day after Trump’s election. Palantir co-founder and board member Peter Thiel was a big Trump supporter during the 2016 election campaign and helped organize a meeting with tech executives at Trump Tower shortly after the election. Karp was also one of the attendees.

However, Karp publicly supported Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 election campaign. In an article published in the New York Times last August, he said Thiel’s early support of Trump and the ensuing backlash “made it harder to actually get things done.”

Nonetheless, Wall Street supported Palantir after the election, fueled by optimism that more military spending would flow to the company.

Karp’s comments in an earnings report ahead of the election suggest the company would be fine either way.

“The growth of our business is accelerating and our financial performance is exceeding expectations as we meet the unwavering demand for cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies from our U.S. government and commercial customers,” Karp said in a letter to shareholders.

According to LSEG, analysts expect revenue growth of about 24% to $3.5 billion in 2025.

robin hood The stock has more than tripled this year, despite falling 17% on Oct. 31 after disappointing results.

Investors looked at the numbers a few days later, and the stock rose 20% as everything cryptocurrency-related rebounded following Trump’s election. One of Robinhood’s biggest growth engines is cryptocurrency, which retail investors can easily purchase on the app along with stocks.

Cryptocurrency trading revenue increased 165% year-over-year in the third quarter to $61 million, accounting for 10% of total net revenue.

In addition to Bitcoin, Robinhood users can easily buy about 20 other cryptocurrencies, ranging from popular digital assets like Ethereum to alternative coins like dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and Bonk. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said at the company’s investment day in November that cryptocurrencies are not just investments, but “disruptive technologies that will transform the underlying infrastructure behind payments, lending and a variety of tradable assets.”

According to LSEG, analysts expect Robinhood to post revenue growth of more than 70% in the fourth quarter, to $805.7 million. This would be the fastest quarterly growth rate since 2021, the year the company went public.

Robinhood’s rally this year has surpassed that of Coinbase, which is up 61%. But Coinbase, with a market capitalization of $70 billion, is still worth twice as much.

Nvidia’s The amazing run continued.

Nvidia rose 239% last year thanks to expectations for generative AI, and soared 183% this year, reaching a market capitalization of a whopping $2.2 trillion.

Nvidia has earned the title of the world’s most valuable public company twice this year. apologize It’s jumping again and approaching $4 trillion, with Nvidia at $3.4 trillion; microsoft 3.3 trillion dollars.

Nvidia remains the biggest beneficiary of the AI ​​boom. That’s because the largest cloud providers and Internet companies grab every graphics processing unit they can find. Annual revenue has grown at least 94% in each of the past six quarters, with growth exceeding 200% three times during that period.

Its next-generation AI chip, called Blackwell, is “in full production,” CEO Jensen Huang said in the company’s latest earnings report. Financial Chief Colette Kress said Blackwell plans to achieve “several billion dollars” in sales in the fourth quarter.

“Every customer is competing to be first to market,” Kress said. “Blackwell is now in the hands of all of our key partners and they are working to build out the data centers.”

While growth is expected to remain robust for a company of Nvidia’s size, an inevitable slowdown is coming. Analysts expect year-over-year growth to slow over the next few quarters, with growth falling to the mid-40s in the second half of next year.

Nvidia is counting on huge profits from a handful of tech giants, so economic volatility poses significant risk for investors.

This helps inform Nvidia of the broad roster of companies building new AI services on Wall Street and explains why it is “racing to accelerate the development of these applications, which will likely see billions of agents deployed in the next few years.” This happens. on the earnings call.

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