Plus, the stocks that led the market this decade and the ones analysts are bullish on for the year ahead.
Stocks were slightly higher to start Friday with the Dow adding 61 points, the S&P 500 gaining 0.1%, and the Nasdaq hovering around the flatline.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq hit the 9,000 mark for the first time on Thursday, spurred higher by a rising Amazon which added 4% after claiming a record-breaking holiday season. “This holiday season, the number of items that were delivered with Prime Free One-Day and Prime Free Same-Day Delivery nearly quadrupled compared to the same time period last holiday season, making this Amazon’s fastest holiday yet,” the company said in a statement. The Nasdaq has been on the rise for 11 straight days marking its longest winning streak since July 2009.
Michaels Companies announced today that it is replacing CEO Mark Cosby after just two months. Taking over the helm will be Walmart executive Ashley Buchanan beginning on January 6. Cosby will remain on through April 1 to help with the transition and will remain on the arts and crafts retailer’s board. “It has been an honor to lead Michaels and to help the company clearly define its core customer and develop a strategy centered on the Makers,” Cosby said in a statement. Buchanan joined Walmart in 2007 and was most recently the big box retailer’s chief merchandising officer for Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce business. Michaels shares are up more than 8% following the executive shake-up.
Tech stocks are poised to close out their best year in the past decade next week. The S&P 500 information technology index has gained 48% in 2019, outpacing the broader index’s 29% gain. Leading the sector’s gains this year has been Apple—which has gained 84% this year—and chip stocks like AMD, which has jumped 153% year-to-date. “The FANG trade did not work out this year,” said Longbow Asset Management CEO Jake Dollarhide. “Other tech plays stepped up. A lot of its is consumer thirst for more and more mobile technology. … This is an Apple world and we’re just lucky enough to live in it.”
Heading into 2020, analysts are most bullish on Apple, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Nike, Nvidia, The Trade Desk, and Zynga. Wells Fargo named Nvidia its top semiconductor stock for the coming year with analyst Aaron Rakers saying, “We see NVIDIA representing the most significant investor sentiment upside driven by our expectation of a meaningful reaccelerating in data center growth through 2020.” Needham analyst Laura Martin said of The Trade Desk, “We expect senior executives at FB, GOOGL and AMZN to be distracted by regulatory and legislative pressures in 2020, which might slow ad spending growth inside these Walled Gardens and accelerate ad revenue growth in the ‘open internet’ where TTD is the largest player.” And according to Guggenheim analyst Robert Drbul, “Nike is our Best Idea as its innovation pipeline is robust ahead of the Summer 2020 Olympics amid a global secular trend toward more active/healthy lifestyles.”
Stocks We’re Watching
Anavex Life Sciences (NASDAQ: AVXL): Shares of this clinical-stage biopharmaceutical stock are up nearly 15% in the last week after reporting its fiscal 2019 results. “Anavex continues to make steady progress towards reaching several important milestones and is poised for an exciting 2020,” said Anavex President and CEO Christopher Missling, PhD. “Bringing novel biomarker-driven CNS precision medicine therapies to patients with devastating rare diseases, as well as the largest unmet medical need of the aging population, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson disease has been the key vision for the development of ANAVEX2-73 (blarcamesine) with multiple data read outs.”
Immunomedics (NASDAQ: IMMU): Immunomedics shares are up nearly 8% this week following the company announcing that the FDA will start reviewing its application to market an antibody treatment for breast cancer called sacituzumab. If the FDA approves the treatment, it will mark Immunomedics first approved product since it was founded in 1982. HC Wainwright analyst Raghuram Selvaraju rates the stock a Buy and boosted his price target from $26 to $31 – 43% higher than the current price.