As we approach the end of the trading year, investors should focus on certain stocks poised for potential significant gains in 2025, as highlighted by investment bank William Blair. With only four trading days remaining in 2024, a year already marked by strong performance for stocks, it’s an opportune time to look ahead. December has been particularly impressive, with record-breaking highs for all three major stock averages. Leading the pack is the Nasdaq Composite, which has climbed about 33% in 2024, outpacing the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In this timeframe, the broader market index rose approximately 26%, while the blue-chip Dow saw a 14% increase.
Looking forward to the new year, William Blair has earmarked several promising stock opportunities across different sectors. Let’s explore some of the firm’s top recommendations. Broadcom has seen significant momentum this month, with its stock surging around 47% in December alone. This remarkable performance brings its total advance for the year to 114%. At the beginning of the month, Broadcom made headlines by surpassing the $1 trillion market cap milestone, spurred by better-than-expected fourth-quarter adjusted earnings and CEO Hock Tan announcing the development of custom AI chips with three major cloud providers. William Blair, rating Broadcom as an outperformer, anticipates further growth, citing “steady growth” from existing collaborations and additional revenues from prospective clients like ByteDance, OpenAI, and Apple. The firm noted, “We see incremental room for expanding margins in 2025 as the company continues with its VMware integration and scales its custom chip business.”
In the pet industry, Chewy has substantially outperformed the broader market, increasing over 48% year to date. William Blair predicts that this positive trend may extend into 2025 as the industry experiences a “modestly improving” environment, which could favor the stock. The firm stated, “We see notable upside still into 2025 stemming from an industry recovery … and ongoing normalization of online migration, both of which are still in early innings. As online migration normalizes, we believe Chewy’s active customer growth will accelerate.”
Turning attention to small-cap stocks, Neurogene, a clinical-stage biotechnology company, achieved a 16% rise in 2024 and seems poised for specific growth. William Blair foresees two “significant value-creating events” next year, focusing on its NGN-401 gene therapy for Rett syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder. Neurogene plans to unveil its registrational trial design for NGN-401 in the year’s first half and present additional clinical data in the second half, developments William Blair believes will boost the stock. This progress follows the therapy’s selection by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its Support for Clinical Trials Advancing Rare Disease Therapeutics (START) program, a move considered “underappreciated” by Wall Street. “We look forward to updates on NGN-401’s registrational pathway, including endpoint selection, in the first half of 2025 and believe a streamlined clinical development pathway could be a major catalyst for the stock,” the firm noted.
Other notable names on William Blair’s 2025 watch list include online used-car retailer Carvana and biopharmaceutical company Viking Therapeutics. These stocks have already seen significant growth this year, soaring over 322% and more than 126%, respectively.
