We recently compiled a list of the Why These 15 Stocks Are Skyrocketing in 2025. In this article, we are going to take a look at where LandBridge Company LLC (NYSE:LB) stands against the other stocks that are skyrocketing now.
The market has started to favor smaller companies in 2025, and stocks between $1 billion and $5 billion in market value are attracting renewed interest. These stocks had a forgettable stretch over the past few years, but investors now see evidence that underperformance among mid-cap and small-cap names could end soon.
The S&P MidCap 400 and S&P 600 indexes still trail large caps by a wide margin, yet smaller firms have held up well even as interest rates remain elevated. The valuation gap between these groups and the biggest names in the market has also widened to levels that analysts consider unusually attractive.
Investors now expect momentum to build for select companies in this sweet spot, and many of them are in fast-growing industries with strong fundamentals.
Methodology
For this article, I screened the top-performing stocks year-to-date in the $1 billion to $5 billion market capitalization bracket. Stocks that I have covered this week will be excluded from this list.
I will also mention the number of hedge fund investors for these stocks. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds invest in? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points. (see more details here).
A laboratory technician wearing a lab coat holding a Petri dish with water samples.
LandBridge Company LLC (NYSE:LB)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders In Q3 2024: 12
LandBridge (NYSE:LB) manages and then leases surface acreage, water rights, and other resources in the Delaware Basin. It then earns fees from easements, brackish water sales, produced water royalties, and oil and gas royalties on its acreage, and it has recently entered data center ventures.
The recent rise is due to a series of acquisitions and management’s higher guidance in Q4 2024. The company struck deals for about 53,080 acres in Lea County, New Mexico, and a big surface package called the Wolf Bone Rach. These transactions lifted its total surface ownership to 272,000 acres. EBITDA guidance was also reiterated at $170-$190 million, which surpassed earlier forecasts.
LandBridge now highlights more than 20% expected accretion to free cash flow per share in 2025 based on earlier deals. Q3 revenue rose 60% year-over-year and reached $28.5 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $25 million, up 62%. The company also pays a quarterly cash dividend of 10 cents per share since its IPO.
The four analysts’ price targets on the stock average $77.25 and imply a 3.5% downside.
LB stock is up 23.6% year-to-date.
Overall LB ranks 13th on our list of the stocks that are skyrocketing in 2025. While we acknowledge the potential of LB as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than LB 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.
