The U.S. stock market witnessed a solid September, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s much-awaited interest rate cut. However, escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East could weigh on investor sentiment this month.
Nonetheless, investors could benefit by ignoring short-term noise and tracking the recommendations of top Wall Street analysts to pick stocks with attractive long-term growth potential.
Bearing that in mind, here are three stocks favored by the Street’s top pros, according to TipRanks, a platform that ranks analysts based on their past performance.
CyberArk Software
This week’s first pick is CyberArk Software (CYBR), a cybersecurity company that is mainly focused on identity security. The company delivered better-than-expected quarterly results and raised its full-year guidance, indicating solid demand for its products.
Recently, RBC Capital analyst Matthew Hedberg initiated coverage of CYBR stock with a buy rating and a price target of $328, calling it a top mid-cap cybersecurity idea. The analyst thinks that the company is in a “good position to consolidate identity spending and maintain durable and increasingly profitable growth.”
Hedberg expects CyberArk to sustain strong growth, driven by the demand for identity security and substantial room to grow within its core Privileged Access Management (PAM) market. Additionally, the analyst thinks that the company can grow beyond the PAM market by pursuing cross-sell opportunities in the Access, Secrets, Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) and machine identities markets.
Hedberg also expects the company to benefit from its acquisition of Venafi, a machine identity specialist. He anticipates that Venafi’s growth will rebound to more than 20% and be accretive to CyberArk’s growth and margins over time.
Overall, Hedberg is optimistic about a further rise in CyberArk’s profitability and expects the company’s organic growth to be above 20% for several years, backed by an estimated total addressable market (TAM) of $60 billion.
Hedberg ranks No. 164 among more than 9,000 analysts tracked by TipRanks. His ratings have been profitable 62% of the time, delivering an average return of 14.7%. (See CYBR Hedge Fund Activity on TipRanks)
Uber Technologies
We move to the ride-sharing and food delivery platform Uber Technologies (UBER). After hosting meetings with the company’s management, JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth reaffirmed a buy rating on UBER stock with a price target of $95.
Highlighting the key takeaways from the meetings, Anmuth said that management is confident about achieving a three-year compound annual growth rate of mid- to high-teens for gross bookings, backed by a stable macro and demand backdrop since the second-quarter earnings. In particular, management stated that demand continues to be healthy in both the Mobility and Delivery businesses.
Anmuth also noted the company’s optimism about expanding its advertising business across Uber Eats and grocery. Notably, the ad business is on a run-rate of $1 billion (as of the second quarter) or about 1% of delivery gross bookings. In fact, delivery profits have improved over the recent quarters due to the high-margin ad business. Uber expects its grocery ad business to account for 5% of gross bookings over time.
The analyst also pointed out the company’s growing interest in autonomous vehicles (AV). “Uber can add value to AV tech providers by driving higher demand/utilization and building out the AV ecosystem through fleet operations,” Anmuth said, based on discussions with management.
Anmuth ranks No. 93 among more than 9,000 analysts tracked by TipRanks. His ratings have been profitable 62% of the time, delivering an average return of 18.4%. (See UBER Stock Buybacks on TipRanks)
Meta Platforms
This week’s third stock pick is social media company Meta Platforms (META). At the recently held Meta Connect event, the company highlighted Quest 3S, its latest virtual reality headset, as well as other innovations, including its latest prototype of augmented-reality (AR) smart glasses (Orion) and the new features of its Meta AI chatbot.
Following the announcements at the event, Baird analyst Colin Sebastian reaffirmed a buy rating on Meta stock and boosted the price target to $605 from $530.
The analyst attributed the higher price target to a number of factors, including significant opportunities to expand core monetization with artificial intelligence (AI)/generative AI features and the ongoing momentum in Messaging. His improved outlook also reflects “generally positive social media ad checks,” with September looking better than the trends noted in August.
The analyst raised his 2025 revenue and 2024 and 2025 earnings per share estimates to reflect stable macro trends, higher contributions from Messaging and enhancements related to devices and AI-driven platform. However, he slightly lowered his 2025 operating margin estimate to reflect increased networking and depreciation expenses.
Commenting on Meta Connect, Sebastian said he thinks that this year’s event reflects the significant progress the company has made with its Reality Labs division and AI/generative AI. Specifically, the analyst thinks that the Llama update provides a further edge to Meta’s LLMs (large language models) over close rivals like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini. He is also optimistic about the innovations related to Meta AI assistant and expects it to be the most popular AI assistant by the end of 2024.
Sebastian ranks No. 277 among more than 9,000 analysts tracked by TipRanks. His ratings have been profitable 57% of the time, delivering an average return of 13.6%. (See META Insider Trading Activity on TipRanks)
