Wedbush analyst Dan Ives reiterated his bullish stance on tech stocks and urged investors to take advantage of yesterday’s selloff to get on the long side.
Ives sees China’s Evergrande as the latest "white knuckle moment" as the sell-off has created “another buying opportunity to own our favorite tech stocks.”
“Our bullish view of tech stocks over the years is predicated on our multi-year thesis that the digital transformation story across the consumer and enterprise ecosystem is still in the early innings of playing out in what we characterize as a $2 trillion market opportunity for the next decade. Of course there was a clear massive pull forward in demand for cloud, e-commerce, cyber security, and facets of the technology ecosystem over the last 18 months during the pandemic with red flag risks out of China, HOWEVER we believe massive growth is still on the horizon with tech stocks and FAANG names underestimating this surge of demand for the next 2-3 years,” Ives said in a client note.
NASDAQ Composite Index fell 2.19% yesterday after initially trading about 3% lower on the day. Yesterday’s low marks a 5-week low for the index that now trades roughly 5% off the all-time high. Ives has a 16000 year-end target for NASDAQ.
“We believe relative to the outsized growth prospects ahead, this is not the time that we are throwing in the white towel on our tech bull thesis with some yelling fire in a crowded theater saying Evergrande is the start of a broader sell-off, but rather doubling down on this opportunity to own the secular winners in FAANG (Apple remains our favorite), cloud (MSFT, DOCU, MTTR, PEGA favorites), cyber security, and 5G looking ahead. Our favorite cyber security names in our coverage remain VRNS, ZS, TLS, SAIL, CYBR, TENB, PANW, and FTNT,” Ives added.
Going forward, the analyst expects the tech bull cycle to continue into 2022 as well as the 4th Industrial Revolution plays out. The analyst also expects major US tech names to benefit from the China portfolio rebalancing as some investors may see the risks of investing in China as too big.
“In a nutshell, we continue to encourage investors to use these pullbacks as times to sharpen their pencils and own the secular winners for the next few years in the burgeoning US tech space,” Ives concludes.