The fourth quarter is underway, and with earnings reports for the third quarter on deck, many investors are looking to add stocks to their portfolios that can add a little extra alpha for the end of the year run. With the potential for another positive year for the major indexes, there is also concern that the market is expensive and overbought. It makes sense now to perhaps book some winners or losers and free up cash for new stocks for the stretch run.
The Jefferies Franchise List of high-conviction stock picks has provided investors outstanding total return since inception in December of 2013, outperforming the S&P 500 in that category by a stunning 25.5%. We found four companies that could be perfect additions for the fourth quarter, as they often excel then.
Activision Blizzard
This remains a top video gaming pick on Wall Street and Jefferies is still very positive on the shares. Activision Blizzard Inc. (NASDAQ: ATVI) develops and publishes online, personal computer (PC), video game console, handheld, mobile and tablet games worldwide. The company develops and publishes interactive entertainment software products through retail channels or digital downloads and downloadable content to a range of gamers.
With its new Blackout mode, many analysts think “Black Ops 4” looks like the most exciting Call of Duty in years, and most are optimistic that Activision Blizzard will have a strong third and fourth quarter. The Jefferies report said this about the second-quarter results:
The company reported results ahead of consensus last week even in the seasonally slow second quarter. Third and fourth quarter guidance looks light but there are significant catalysts including expansions and a new Call of Duty. We believe the company could launch four mobile games in the next twelve months and they could contribute between $200 million and $500 million of incremental revenue upside. We raised our price target and note our earning over share estimates for 2018 and 2019 remain ahead of consensus.
A recent Jefferies research piece noted this:
We believe Activision is building a Disneystyle entertainment business for the 21st century, but with higher operating margins.
Shareholders receive just a 0.41% dividend. The Jefferies price target for the stock is $90, and the Wall Street consensus target is $81.15. The stock closed Wednesday’s trading at $83.02.
Alphabet
The search giant continues to expand and, while search is king, the cloud presence is growing fast. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) is a global technology company focused on key areas, such as search, advertising, operating systems and platforms, enterprise and hardware products. It generates revenue primarily by delivering online advertising and by selling apps and contents on Google Play, as well as hardware products. The company provides its products and services in more than 100 languages and in 190 countries, regions and territories.
Alphabet offers performance and brand advertising services. It operates through Google and Other Bets segments. The Google segment includes principal internet products, such as Search, Ads, Commerce, Maps, YouTube, Apps, Cloud, Android, Chrome and Google Play, as well as technical infrastructure and newer efforts, such as virtual reality.
The company blew out the latest earnings numbers, and with a wide and bountiful silo of products and services, the stock remains almost unchallenged. It should be noted that traffic acquisition cost relief drove 20% gross profit growth, despite heavy cloud infrastructure and YouTube content investment.
At a recent conference, Google outlined expanding capabilities to facilitate commerce, capitalizing on the “treasure trove” of data provided by seven different properties, each with at least a billion active users (Android, Search, Chrome, Maps, Play, YouTube and Gmail). Smart shopping campaigns leverage machine learning to make sense of touch points along the consumer purchase path, including better offline attribution capabilities (locally oriented searches up 200% over past two years) and improved purchase conversion rates (20% on average).
Jefferies has a $1,450 price target, and the consensus target is $1,385.10. The shares closed Wednesday at $1,211.53.
24/7 Wall St.Comcast
Jefferies recently added this top media and entertainment company to its well-respected Franchise Picks list. Comcast Corp. (NASDAQ: CMCSA) is the largest U.S. provider of cable services, with over 22 million basic subscribers. It owns NBCU, which includes the NBC TV Networks, Telemundo, MSNBC, USA, Syfy, Bravo, E!, CNBC and several other cable networks, as well as Universal Films and Universal Theme Parks.
Comcast has invested in technology to build an advanced network that delivers among the fastest broadband speeds and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings.
With the midterm election cycle starting up soon, this company stands to benefit big time, and a stunning 69.6% of the fund managers own the shares. The analysts noted this in the report:
Comcast shares are attractively valued, in our view, and the company is well positioned in video and broadband, even amid mounting fears of cord-cutting. Further, the free-cash-flow outlook supports higher buybacks, with the potential for meaningful EPS accretion. We believe concerns about a bid for Sky/Fox are largely reflected in the current valuation, though the uncertain outcome creates an overhang which may limit near-term share appreciation.
Investors receive a 2.16% dividend. The $44 Jefferies price target compares with the $43.02 consensus price target and the most recent close at $35.19 a share.
24/7 Wall St.Nvidia
This stock is one of the firm’s top picks in the chip arena. Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) is one of the leaders when it comes to supplying graphics processing technology for the 3D graphics market, including desktop graphics processors and gaming consoles.
Nvidia is also moving into visual computing chips for cars, mobile devices and supercomputers. It has been able to use its ability to leverage past investments, with a more controlled spending structure ahead on unified, which enables strong cash flow that is allowing a focus on capital return, which is currently estimated to be $1 billion next year.
The stock is sensitive to risk-off in high-growth stocks, but new second-half products in gaming, artificial intelligence/data center can catalyze recovery. Overstated noise from crypto mining (offset by gaming strength) and autonomous car testing (immaterial for two years) has added volatility to the shares. The analysts said this in the report:
We see the company as a major beneficiary of the 4th Tectonic Shift in Computing, where parallel processing captures share in the computing market. We think NVIDIA’s decade-long investment in CUDA has resulted in a multi-year competitive advantage. We think core Gaming will benefit from increased demand for high-end PC cards and mining GPUs for cryptocurrency. Our field work indicates that the Volta-based tensor cores (matrix multiplication) has put into its next-generation Datacenter architecture extends the lead over competitive merchant neural networking processors.
Jefferies has set its price target at $320. The consensus target is $297.21, and shares closed Wednesday at $286.73.
These are four top stocks to buy that could be exciting fourth-quarter portfolio additions. It is important to note that these stocks are suited for aggressive growth accounts that can stand price fluctuations and volatility. It may make sense to buy partial positions in front of the upcoming third-quarter results.
Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.
Latest from 24/7
