With the Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQINDEX: ^IXIC) moving into correction territory (down at least 10% from an all-time high), several of its constituent stocks are suddenly a lot more attractively priced than they were to start the year. While investors never like to see markets pull back into correction territory, it does present a great buying opportunity for some great companies caught up in the sell-off.
Let’s look at two quality stocks you can buy on this market dip and hold forever.
With the market pullback, Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG) finds its shares down about 20% (as of this writing) from its all-time highs set in early February. The dip in price brings its stock down to a very attractive valuation of a forward price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) of 18.5. That’s not expensive for a company with the set of businesses that Alphabet owns.
While best known for its search business Google, Alphabet is actually a whole lot more. It is the world’s leading digital advertising company, where it connects advertisers with consumers through both its own properties as well as third-party sites. Google is the largest digital advertising platform in the world, while its YouTube platform is the world’s fourth-largest. In between are Meta Platforms‘ social media apps, such as Facebook and Instagram, and Amazon, which serves up sponsored ads for third-party products sold on its site.
Alphabet is betting heavily on artificial intelligence (AI), which it is using to improve its search results and to create AI Overviews to quickly give users answers to their questions. Historically, the company has only served ads on about 20% of its search queries, so its AI Overviews are a strong potential source of growth as eventually, it should be able to monetize them through new ad formats. The company has a huge network of advertisers and search history, so all the ingredients are there to profit from AI Overviews.
At the same time, the company’s newest Gemini 2.0 model is improving and catching up to the competition. It has its own Gemini app, while Gemini is also being incorporated throughout Alphabet’s businesses. This is helping the company become a leader in multimodal search (such as visual search), while its Veo 2 text-to-image video generator has risen above the competition.
Alphabet also owns the third-largest cloud computing business with Google Cloud, which is helping customers build out their own AI models and applications. The unit grew revenue by 30% last quarter and segment income by 142%. The unit has seen a profitability inflection point now that it has reached sufficient scale. The company has also developed its own custom AI chip with the help of Broadcom, which it says is leading to faster inference times and lower costs. This should help the business continue to see margin improvements.