Whether you’re new to investing or have been in the stock market for a while, there’s always a good time to invest in quality companies. Finding the right stocks for your portfolio takes time, research, and patience, and good returns don’t usually happen overnight.
However, if you stick with great companies through the ups and downs of the market while making your money work for you regardless of market movements, you can steadily grow your portfolio without relying on flawed strategies like marketing timing.
If you’re looking to invest some of your hard-earned savings in stocks this month and have a small amount of money, like $200, to invest, here are two top stocks to consider for your shopping cart right now.
1. Pfizer
Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) isn’t giving investors the returns they were used to when it grew during the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean it’s a one-off.
The company was one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies long before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. While growth slowed in the years leading up to the pandemic, and the development of the blockbuster COVID-19 vaccine Comirnaty and the oral antiviral drug Paxlovid injected a new wave of growth into Pfizer’s business, this kind of cyclicality is not uncommon for a company of its size, scale and maturity.
Pfizer has achieved record profits and sales from its COVID-19 products, becoming the first company in pharmaceutical history to surpass $100 billion in annual sales in 2022. Knowing that COVID-19 sales would inevitably decline and that patents on several key products were approaching end-of-patent in the latter part of the decade, Pfizer management immediately set to work using this windfall of cash and profits to pursue a series of strategic acquisitions.
These acquisitions have included biopharmaceutical assets like Arena Pharmaceuticals, Global Blood Therapeutics and Seagen. These many multibillion-dollar acquisitions have all bolstered Pfizer’s portfolio and pipeline, but cancer drugmaker Seagen appears to be one of the most monumental of these acquisition efforts. Pfizer’s $43 billion purchase of Seagen was the largest deal in the biopharma industry in about four years.
The addition of Seagen to Pfizer’s already extensive oncology program was notable, in part because it doubled the company’s drug portfolio and added four new approved cancer drugs to the lineup. Today, management expects to have at least eight potential blockbusters in its cancer drug pipeline by 2030 and is focused on expanding its footprint, particularly in various forms of breast cancer, genitourinary cancer, hematology-oncology and thoracic cancer. Management estimates that the Seagen acquisition alone is on track to add an additional $10 billion to Pfizer’s annual revenue by 2030.
In the first quarter of 2024, Pfizer reported revenue of just under $15 billion. That was down double digits from the year-ago quarter due to lower sales…
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