Prepare Your Portfolio for 2019: Top Stocks to Watch

Since the dawn of time, humans wanted to know what the future holds, be it for personal gain, out of fear, or through sheer curiosity. This desire gave rise to fortune tellers, witch doctors, prophets, seers, and many a conman. The desire to obtain foreknowledge of the future birthed mythologies and spawned plenty of works of fiction.

When it comes to investing, knowing the future could be a huge advantage, one that can help you create great wealth or save you from losing your shirt.

While we here at Investing.com don’t claim to know what the future holds, we have enough experience to give you a few good leads for 2019. This is not an investing guide, but rather what our senior analyst, Jesse Cohen, speculates for the upcoming year.

The fear of a full-blown trade-war between the U.S. and China has hit Chinese-owned stocks hard. However, there’s a good possibility that the issue will be resolved in the first half of 2019.

If this is indeed the case, you may want to keep your eyes on 2 stocks that have suffered greatly from the 2 economic giants trading blows:

1. Alibaba [BABA] - Jack Ma’s cash cow has lost 28.5% since June, going from a high of $210 to $150 in early November. Should the trade war subside, investors might see a return to possibly even the $200+ mark.
2. Baidu [BIDU] - China’s alternative to Google also took a beating, dropping 28.9% since July. While the stock is currently at around $194, it can jump back up to $240 or even more.

Meanwhile, you can have a look at the other side of the Atlantic, where you might want to consider 2 established tech giants who could surprise us all in 2019:

1. Microsoft [MSFT] - The company that made Bill Gates the richest man in the world (for a while) has seen a %300 growth in the last 5 years, with much of it happening in the last 2 years. The company shifted much of its focus from developing operating systems to pushing its cloud-hosting platform “Azure”, which resulted in over $30 billion revenue in 2018 Q4.
2. Adobe Systems Inc. [ADBE] - Similarly to Microsoft, Adobe was known more for its software (mainly the photo-manipulation tool Photoshop), but has since shifted its focus towards cloud computing too. With YOY growth of 22%, Adobe enjoyed $2.2 billion revenue in Q2 2018 and in the last 5 years its stock too rose by 300%, without any sign of slowing down.

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