The US market is green today, reflecting the optimism of the market participants. Some stocks are outperforming the broader market based on analyst recommendations. These recommendations pertain to the stock prospects in 2025 as the economy heads for recovery in a monetary easing environment.
Analyst recommendations often come with insights on the stock based on extensive research by the analysts involved. Even though this research has its limitations and biases, it gives investors an idea of which stocks to bet on to outperform the market.
To come up with a list of stocks that are surging on analyst recommendations, we only considered stocks that received an analyst recommendation in the last 24 hours and have a market cap of at least $1 billion.
5. LegalZoom.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:LZ)
LegalZoom.com, Inc. operates an online platform in the United States. The platform supports small businesses and consumers in fulfilling their legal, compliance, and business management needs. Although the company showed poor performance in the first 10 months of 2024, the worst is over as things start improving for LZ.
LegalZoom.com started rising after receiving an upgrade from J.P Morgan from underweight to overweight, with the target price rising from $8 to $9. Adjusted EBITDA also received a boost, increasing to $167 million from $163 million.
The company is positioned for growth after changing to a software-driven subscription-based business model. As LZ is focusing on AI enhancements, high-potential customers and subscription-based products will likely drive growth and improve EBITDA margins above estimates in 2025.
4. Maplebear Inc. (NASDAQ:CART)
Maplebear (Instacart) has become a hot property as Needham just upgraded the online grocery delivery stock with a target price of $80. The company outperformed in the 2nd half of the past year by raising the expected growth. It is forecasted that it will keep following the trend into 2025 as well.
The news about Instacart replacing Enovis Corp in the S&P MidCap 400 index is helping the stock gain traction. This raised the share price of the company, converting a loss into a gain of 4.6% when the news broke. At this rate, it should continue to gain after being added to the S&P MidCap 400 on January 14.
Instacart also announced a partnership with Cut+Dry to increase case sales and gain growth. To ensure same-day delivery, the company has just declared a partnership with Ulta Beauty. These partnerships will help improve the company’s operations by making it the right choice for customers for their online shopping.
3. Crown Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CCK)
Crown Holdings, Inc. provides packaging services to businesses globally. It operates through four segments which include transit packaging, Americas beverages, Asia Pacific, and European beverages. The company was upgraded by Morgan Stanley based on revised marketing conditions for packaging. CCK was upgraded from equal-weight to overweight.
Stefan Diaz said that packaging demand is expected to increase in 2025 as consumer goods prices stabilize. This will benefit Crown Holdings by growing its sales and generating more revenue.
Two out of four segments are key drivers of growth for CCK. The Americas and European beverage segments performed well during the past year. The growth rate of both segments was 5.63% and 6.9% respectively and this growth is expected to continue.
2. Ardagh Metal Packaging S.A. (NYSE:AMBP)
Ardagh Metal Packaging S.A., a subsidiary of Ardagh Group S.A. is a supplier of consumer metal beverage cans to multiple markets including the US, Europe, and Brazil. The stock is surging after Morgan Stanley upgraded the stock’s rating. The upgrade was based on improved market conditions for packaging.
It shows strong growth potential for 2025, as 2024 presented an increase of 15% in adjusted EBITDA and a rise of 2% in metal beverage can shipments.
Ardagh is ready to expand from the 4.7% expected annual growth for aluminum cans to 2033. The Aluminum can market is projected to grow to over $92B by 2033. These projections show things will go in favor of AMBP making it a considerable option to invest.
1. Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA)
Nvidia stock doesn’t really rely on analyst recommendations for a surge. But after a few bad days, Bernstein’s positive outlook on the stock has helped soothe investors’ nerves. Just yesterday, the White House introduced new rules to stop the sale of modern chips to China. Nvidia stands to lose business because of these restrictions, so the stock had a bad day.
Investors are also keeping a close eye on Nvidia’s troubles with the execution of its Blackwell GPUs. As much as the company keeps denying any issues, ramping up deliveries is a tough task, mainly because the equipment needed to support these GPUs is still not perfect.
Bernstein analysts believe these issues are only temporary. The sale of a certain type of Hopper GPUs to China, which the company introduced for the Chinese market by lowering the bandwidth available on the chips, is unlikely to be affected. So Nvidia’s existing business is safe. Over the past few years, Nvidia’s reliance on its China revenue has gone down from 25% to 15%, which means the country is now less likely to be affected by a trade war between the two countries.
Nvidia is 5th on our latest list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 193 hedge fund portfolios held NVDA at the end of the third quarter which was 179 in the previous quarter. While we acknowledge the potential of NVDA as a leading AI investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as NVDA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.
