You might have noticed that the well known Dow Jones Industrial Average seems to be getting lost in the shuffle during our current bull market. Yes, I know. The Dow has gone up over the course of the last year, but its performance is rather far behind the S&P 500 and also the Nasdaq-100. Not everyone who is on the Dow is getting left behind, thankfully. There are three stocks that are looking to make a killing in 2024 and likely beyond that.
The first one, according to Keith Speights of the Motley Fool, is Amazon:
Amazon(AMZN -2.37%) is one of three “Magnificent Seven” stocks in the Dow. Its performance over the last 12 months has been worthy of the “magnificent” label, with shares skyrocketing close to 70%. Wall Street thinks Amazon can keep up its winning ways. The consensus 12-month price target for the stock reflects an upside potential of 11%. I share analysts’ optimism about Amazon.
The company’s cost-cutting efforts are paying off. Amazon’s earnings jumped to $10.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023 from $0.3 billion in the prior-year period. I look for continued bottom-line momentum in the coming quarters.
Of course, the most critical thing to keep in mind is that the company’s prospects for long-term growth are staying strong. One of the newest and most important grow drivers for Amazon is advertising. Amazon is also planning to launch a brand new venture called Project Kuiper, which is a series of satellites designed to provide folks with internet service from space. Which is, I think, super awesome and will help folks that normally can’t access the web from where they live have access they were denied before.
The second stock Speights says is going to skyrocket on the Dow is Intel.
Until recent weeks, Intel(INTC 1.74%) stood as one of the best-performing Dow stocks over the last 12 months. However, the giant chipmaker’s massive losses in its foundry business revealed earlier this month dampened investors’ enthusiasm. Analysts still like Intel, though. The average 12-month price target for the stock is nearly 21% higher than the current share price. Although I’m unsure if Intel will hit that target over the next 12 months, I’m bullish about the stock overall.
For one thing, Intel expects its foundry business to be highly profitable by 2030. I believe the company’s investment in manufacturing semiconductor chips for others is a smart long-term move.
Speights also wrote, “I also like Intel’s AI prospects. Its new Gaudi 3 AI chip could take some data center market share away from Nvidia. Edge AI — pushing AI processing to where data is generated — should present another big opportunity for Intel over the next several years.”
Thirdly, we have Salesforce, a company that has done a significant amount of heavylifting to bring the Dow Jones back up. The company’s shares have gone up by over 37 percent in the last 12 months. The stock went even higher than that, however, that didn’t stick as reports came out indicating Salesforce was in talks to purchase Informatica, which investors were less than enthused about.
Any potential deal in the works has since fallen apart. Wall Street hasn’t been rattled by the uncertainty, though. The consensus 12-month price target for Salesforce reflects an upside potential of roughly 14%.
Salesforce has been in a period of transformation — a good one for the company. As CEO Marc Benioff said in the Q4 earnings call, “[P]roductivity is up, profitability is up, margin’s up, revenue is up.”
Speights then stated that he feels Salesforce is going to keep on benefiting from the increasing use of artificial intelligence technology. Salesforces is getting into this space through launching Einstein 1 Studio. It’s a brand new product that enables Salesforce users to highly customize the Einstein Copilot AI assistant.