Best stocks to buy in 2024 (2024)

Alphabet is the parent company of Google and YouTube and is the world’s leading online search provider. Alphabet is a market leader in online advertising and one of the top innovators in artificial intelligence technology. In addition, Alphabet has a sizable cloud services business and is the parent company of subsidiaries such as cybersecurity firm Mandiant, wearable fitness device maker Fitbit and autonomous vehicle technology company Waymo.

Alphabet’s stock has been hot in the past year as the company has rolled out its Bard AI chatbot and Gemini AI model in response to OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT. AI technology is a tremendous long-term growth opportunity for Alphabet, but its core businesses also generated a whopping $73.7 billion in profits in 2023.

Meta Platforms owns and operates some of the world’s largest social media and messaging platforms, including Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. As of December 2023, Meta had 3.19 billion family daily active people across all its platforms, up 8% from a year ago. Facebook alone has 2.11 billion daily active users, up 6% year over year.

Facebook’s late 2021 pivot to focusing on the metaverse got off to a rocky start in 2022, and the company’s Reality Labs unit has reported heavy losses as it develops metaverse and virtual reality technologies. Fortunately, Meta is still generating solid revenue and user growth, its net income more than tripled year over year in the most recent quarter, and the company recently implemented its first-ever quarterly dividend.

Broadcom is a diversified semiconductor company that designs, develops and supplies a range of analog semiconductor devices. Broadcom makes chips for the data center, broadband, wireless, networking, storage and industrial markets.

Broadcom is highly exposed to the smartphone market, and Apple alone accounts for about 20% of the company’s total revenue. However, Broadcom has been investing in diversifying its business in recent years, including acquiring network gear maker Brocade in 2017, software company CA Technologies in 2018 and the enterprise security business of Symantec in 2019. Broadcom also recently acquired cloud software company VMware (VMW) after a lengthy period of regulatory scrutiny.

UnitedHealth is the largest U.S.-managed health care firm. The company provides health insurance via its UnitedHealthcare business and serves as a pharmacy benefit manager via its Optum Rx business, a health care provider via its Optum Health segment and a health analytics firm via its Optum Insight subsidiary.

UnitedHealth is one of the biggest blue-chip health care companies, and the company is targeting long-term annual earnings growth of between 13% and 16%. The health care sector is considered a defensive market sector, meaning long-term investors can sleep easy at night knowing demand and earnings are relatively insulated from economic downturns.

ServiceNow provides software-as-a-service applications to help customers automate and manage business processes and workflows. As businesses grow and digitally transform their operations, their workflows can become increasingly complex. ServiceNow customers can simplify the situation by using ServiceNow’s software to automate processes such as document creation, email correspondence and task assignments.

ServiceNow has extremely high customer retention rates, and more than 75% of its customers have purchased multiple products.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, ServiceNow reported impressive 27% year-over-year subscription revenue growth and 26% overall revenue growth. In addition, current remaining performance obligations were up 24% from a year ago, while transactions over $1 million were also up 33%.