Stocks to Consider for March
Despite last month’s rocky market environment, investors will be looking for trading positions going into March. In this article, we take a look at three companies making waves in their respective industries.
First up is Nvidia Corporation, a technology company known for its graphics processing units and artificial intelligence hardware and software. Despite the failed acquisition of Arm, Nvidia’s stock has seen a rise year-to-date.
Next, we have Shopify Inc., a Canadian e-commerce company that provides online retailers with a suite of services, including payments, marketing, and shipping. Despite a recent drop in stock price, Shopify remains in a good position as the most popular e-commerce software on the market, with retail e-commerce spending expected to grow in the coming years.
Lastly is Legal & General Group, a British multinational financial services and asset management company. L&G’s all segments of the business are growing well, with dividends, EBITDA, and NI all showing strong CAGR growth. The stock has seen a slight rise in price in the past month, and while it had a tough year in 2022, L&G remains a major player in the industry.
Nvidia Corporation
Nvidia Corporation is a technology company based in Santa Clara, California, that designs and manufactures graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (APIs), and system-on-a-chip units (SoCs) for mobile computing and the automotive market. Its professional line of GPUs is used in workstations for applications in architecture, engineering, and scientific research. Nvidia is also a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence hardware and software, providing an API called CUDA for massively parallel programs that utilize GPUs, and is deployed in supercomputing sites around the world.
Nvidia has expanded its presence in the gaming industry with handheld game consoles, such as the Shield Portable and Shield TV, and its cloud gaming service GeForce Now. The company’s Tegra mobile processors are used in smartphones, tablets, and vehicle navigation and entertainment systems. Its competitors include Intel, Qualcomm, and AI-accelerator companies such as Graphcore.
Nvidia’s offer to acquire Arm from SoftBank failed to materialize following regulatory scrutiny, leading to the termination of the deal in February 2022. Despite this setback, Nvidia’s stock has performed well, rising 62.18% year-to-date and experiencing a 10.85% rise in the past month. However, the stock took a dive of 1.11% today (as of the time of writing), which is consistent with its 12-month drop.
Shopify Inc
Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Shopify is the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. The Shopify platform offers online retailers a suite of services including payments, marketing, shipping, and customer engagement tools.
The company reported that it has more than a million businesses across the board using its platform as of May 2021. According to BuiltWith, 1.58 million websites run on the Shopify platform as of 2021. According to W3Techs, 4.4% of the top 10 million websites use Shopify. The total gross merchandise volume exceeded US$61 billion for calendar 2019. As of July 2022, Shopify is among the top 20 largest publicly traded Canadian companies by market capitalization. Total revenue for the full year 2021 was $4.611 billion.
Thanks to its robust functionality, Shopify ranks as the most popular e-commerce software on the market, according to research company G2. That puts the company in a good spot; retail e-commerce spend is expected to grow at nearly 14% annually to reach $15 trillion by 2030, according to Ameco Research.
The stock was trading at 41.14 U.S. dollars, after a 1.63% spike in price as of the time of writing. Though it has had a rough week having dropped by 18.15% in price, its year-to-date rise has come to 15.30%.
Legal & General Group
Legal & General Group Inc is a British multinational financial services and asset management company headquartered in London, England.
Its products and services include investment management, lifetime mortgages, pensions, annuities, and life assurance.
As of January 2020, it no longer provides general insurance following the sale of Legal & General Insurance to Allianz. It has operations in the United Kingdom and the United States, with investment management businesses in the Gulf, Europe, and Asia.
Legal & General is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM), the asset management arm of L&G, is the 10th largest investment management firm in the world by AUM. It is also the second-largest institutional investment management firm in Europe (after BlackRock).
The stock was trading at 256.40 GBX (sterling pounds) as of the time of writing after its price rose by 0.08% today. In the past month, the stock price has shot up by 0.47% bringing its year-to-date spike to 1.59%. Like most other stocks in the industry, it had a rough year last year which has affected its past 12-month drop which stands at 1.12%.
Investor’s Note
In conclusion, these stocks have shown varying levels of performance in the past year, with some facing challenges while others thrive. Despite the setbacks faced by some of these companies, they have remained resilient and continue to make strides in their respective industries.
Nvidia’s dominance in AI hardware and software, Shopify’s popularity as the leading e-commerce software, and Legal & General’s position as a global insurance and asset management business with significant assets under management make them promising investments.
As always, it is important for investors to stay informed to make investment decisions.