Top 5 Tech Stock Performers of the Year Out If It's Not AI It's About Cryptocurrency
The Nasdaq Composite Index has risen 33% this year, and the best of them are directly related to artificial intelligence (AI), and the election of cryptocurrency-supporting Donald Trump as president has led to a surge in cryptocurrency-related stocks.
With only four trading days left in the year, CNBC listed the following five best performing tech stocks among U.S. public companies with market capitalization of $5 billion or more by 2024:
AppLovin is up 757.8% this year.
The company was originally known for investing in handheld game studios with titles like Woody Block Puzzle, Clockmaker and Bingo Story, and AppLovin's 2021 IPO coincided with the online gaming boom during the C.I.P.E. outbreak, but its core business has shifted to online advertising, with significant profits coming from AI advancements.AppLovin's 2021 IPO coincided with the online gaming boom during the Candidiasis epidemic, but its core business has now shifted to online advertising, and it is also capitalizing on the progress of AI.
AppLovin's market capitalization has soared from $13 billion to more than $110 billion so far this year, outpacing such notable names as Starbucks, Intel and Airbnb.
MicroStrategy Up 467.1% This Year
MicroStrategy's stock price has surged 346% in the last year, and even more this year, thanks in large part to the continued bitcoin purchases that have made founder Michael Saylor a legend in the cryptocurrency world.
Originally a mediocre provider of business intelligence software, MicroStrategy announced plans to start buying Bitcoins back in 2020, and now holds more than 444,000 Bitcoins, taking advantage of the rising stock price to raise more Bitcoins through capital raises and debt.
MicroStrategy is now the world's fourth-largest Bitcoin holder, behind Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust and cryptocurrency exchange Binance.The value of MicroStrategy's bitcoin holdings is worth nearly $44 billion, and MicroStrategy's market capitalization has now risen to $80 billion.
Palantir up 379.8% this year
Palantir's brightest surge came last month, when the software company raised its earnings outlook the day before the U.S. presidential election.
In a press release accompanying the report, Alex Karp, chief executive of the company, which sells data analytics tools primarily to defense agencies, said, "We've had a breakneck quarter, and we can't stop growing as AI continues to be in strong demand.Palantir co-founder and director Peter Thiel was a key supporter of Trump's 2016 campaign.
Robinhood is up 210.7% this year
Robinhood fell 17% on October 31st after a disappointing financial report.A few days later, investors ignored those numbers and Robinhood shares rebounded 20% as the stock market rallied with cryptocurrencies after Trump's election. The biggest growth driver in Robinhood's business is cryptocurrencies, which can be easily purchased by retail traders on the Robinhood app, including Bitcoin, and traded on the stock market.
Revenue from cryptocurrency trading surged 165 percent year-over-year to $61 million in the third quarter, accounting for 10 percent of net revenue.
NVIDIA (Phaidon) Up 183.2% This Year
After seeing its stock soar 239% last year on the back of the generative AI boom, Phaida has nearly quadrupled this year, increasing its market capitalization to a whopping $2.2 trillion.
Pfizer continues to be the biggest beneficiary of the AI boom, as major cloud service providers and dot-com companies are doing everything in their power to snap up Pfizer's graphics processing units (GPUs).Over the past six quarters, Fidelity's revenue has grown at least 94% year-over-year, including over 200% in three of those quarters.
For a company of its size, growth is inevitably slowing down.Analysts predicted that Pfizer's annual growth rate could drop to about 40 percent-plus by the second half of next year.
