I revealed Wednesday the $300 million Nvidia is investing in five stocks, but that's pocket change compared to Google owner Alphabet. The search giant is the largest corporate buyer of stocks and a huge acquirer of companies with over $1. 7 billion invested in more than 40 stocks.
But Alphabet's recent 13F update wasn't about buying. It was about consolidating, narrowing the list of stocks it really wants to own. The $2 trillion tech monster sold out of two stocks completely and cut positions in two others.
I'm going to highlight the changes along with the three best stocks to buy now before Alphabet buys them. Let's get started with my top cyber security stock. Crowd Strike Holdings took our CRWD with Alphabet reporting a stake of almost $428,000 shares worth over $144 million.
I started buying CrowdStrike after the massive outage last year when researching the company found that its Falcon platform is the best available for enterprise protection. Its AI native security is driving a 27% growth rate in annual recurring revenue, subscription revenue that is extremely sticky and just keeps on growing. Crowdstrike is leading in the kind of AI powered security that I think is going to be the next evolution in the theme with detection speeds fast enough to stop those AIdriven threats.
And put it this way, Crowdstrike's AIA security is so good, even Grandma's Facebook password is safe. Revenue is forecast to $4. 8 billion next year and could go even higher than that 25% annual rate as cyber security spending ramps up against the AI threat.
CrowdStrike is also on the verge of gap profitability seen here in research I put together on the industry. That profitability is impressive considering it's also growing so fast. And while shares are extremely expensive on that price toearnings basis with those earnings expected to grow a 19% pace over the next 2 years, the adjusted valuation makes this one an excellent deal.
Now to me, this one sounds like just a simple return investment for Alphabet. The 400,000 shares is less than a fifth of a percent of ownership in Crowdstrike, so it's got no real say in the company, and there aren't many strategic reasons here. It's just been investing in the best companies in one of the best growth themes.
Crowdstrike is not only my biggest cyber security bet, but also one of the largest positions in my portfolio. With 300 shares I started buying last year after that outage, up 20% even after the recent sell-off, I think the stock can reach $500 per share based on a forecast of $5 billion in sales times a slightly conservative 25 times pricetoes basis. That is a solid 29% upside return with more to come on that cyber security theme.
I highlighted why companies like Alphabet might buy another company's stock and how to use this information in our Nvidia video that I'll link to in the description. But remember, we know that the company is buying these because every company or large institutional investor is required to file that form 13F with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC disclosing their investments in publicly traded stocks. That disclosure is meant to help the SEC head off any possible stock price manipulation by hedge funds and other big money players, but can also be used by investors to jump in on those investments ahead of an acquisition or just a bump in the price.
You can always find these 13F filings by going to the SEC Edgar database online and then searching for the company name. Then click through to where you see the most recent 13F report for a list of those investments or researching through Alphabet's investments. Not all of these are going to be for those return purposes.
Some might be for strategic reasons. So, make sure you watch that Nvidia video so you know how to tell the difference and how to invest. Now, I'm going to be using Alphabet's prior 13F filing here to highlight the changes.
And one of the biggest ones is selling more than 3 million shares of GitLab Inc. ticker GTLB, the GitHub competitor. Of course, that said, GitLab is still Alphabet's largest investment by a big margin with 3.
7% ownership of the company and worth over $300 million at the current price. Alphabet dropping GitLab shares here is like breaking up with your girlfriend but keeping her Netflix password. Still invested but more distance.
GitLab is an open source code development platform for security and IT operations. Free for individuals but through plans for multi-user and enterprise. Now if you've heard about coders using AI to develop, GitLab is one of the most comprehensive tools being used helping coders deploy faster with fewer operations.
That tool set helps drive return on investment for enterprise users and a payback period that has helped the company grow to over 9,300 enterprise users in the most recent quarter and 1,000 users above a 100,000 revenue point. Alphabet has owned shares of GitLab since before it was a public company investing in the startup. So while it was a big move selling more than a third of its stake, I think it was just taking profits more than anything.
We're going to see that theme and consolidating and pulling back some investments throughout this video. So I think it was just alphabet saying we need to show a realized profit on some of these. Revenue is expected to grow at that 20% plus pace we'd like to see with these growth stocks forecasted to nearly a billion dollars next year and earnings growth is really impressive increasing at an 83% annualized pace to 67 cents a share on fiscal 2026 forecast.
And then in the recent sell-off in tech, their shares have become a much better deal at 11 times on that price to sales basis, which isn't cheap, but is better than where the stock was trading at over the last year. On that 20% plus growth, I could see picking up a few shares here. Though I think we are likely to see further selling pressure through the summer.
UPath, ticker PATH, was having a hell of a day last week when I wrote this up, falling 15% on the fourth quarter earnings and its outlook. Google made no change to its investment last quarter, holding on to over 7 million shares, now worth $72 million. And I also own the shares here, not $72 million worth, but 4,000 shares, worth $40,000.
And I'm taking the sell-off as an opportunity to buy more. That's because UiPath is a leader in the process automation, the kind of agentic AI that's going to be key for a lot of companies. And UiPath is a leader in that machine learning and applications making it possible.
This kind of automation isn't waiting on the nextG AI, but already here with a $30 billion market with a potential up to 60 billion according to Forester. While growth has slowed, UiPath still expects to reach 1. 53 billion in revenue over this year and is scaling into larger companies.
So even as we see some of that hype come out of these AI stocks and worries we won't need so much infrastructure like chips and servers to run it this use case for AI the assistance and the agencies is still the next evolution and software providers like UiPath, Salesforce and Service Now are going to be the ones to lead. And while the company did beat forecast for earnings, it missed its sales forecast by just a fraction reporting $424 million versus the estimate for $425 million in quarterly revenue. But then it was really the outlook that crushed the stock with the first quarter guidance to $330 million instead of $368 million that Wall Street was expecting.
On top of this, analysts are just worried that cuts on government spending are going to hit growth as it has for shares of Palunteer. While it will slow growth in that short term, the company has a strong advantage in that agentic AI theme that again is going to be the next evolution in artificial intelligence and the shares are now cheap at just 3. 6 times on a price to this year's sales basis.
I think this is a great buy the dip opportunity. We'll get back to those stocks Alphabet is buying, but if you want to see the five stocks I'm buying for the next 30 years, my forever stocks, look for the link I'll leave in the description below. These are the stocks I'm following in major multi-year themes with one of the picks up 100% and the group up an average 94% last year alone.
That report is totally free. You're going to see the first stock immediately. And they'll email you the full report with the rest of the stocks.
It's an easy way to support the Let's Talk Money community and see some of my favorite stocks to buy. So, look for that link below. While Alphabet didn't change its investment in ARM Holdings, ticker ARM, I wanted to highlight it here because it is the company's second largest with over 1.
9 million shares worth $219 million. And this is one we see across big tech. Nvidia cut its investment by about 800,000 shares last quarter, but still owns over a million shares of ARM.
ARM licenses out its chip architecture out to semiconductor designers like Nvidia, Intel, and AMD. And those chips are the brains within servers and that edge computing devices. So ARM is really the backbone on which much of the industry is built.
The company has seen its royalty revenue broadening out across end markets, even the ones like mobile and consumer electronics that haven't traditionally needed those high compute chips. ARM did spook investors with its most recent results showing its first quarteron-quarter decline in revenue in two years, but is still posting solid year-over-year growth. And last quarter's weakness could be just timing issue before a big jump this quarter.
Fullear revenue growth of 24% expected this year to $4. 9 billion. And while the sell-off has brought the shares down to 24 times that expected revenue, that's still pretty expensive.
So, I'm waiting for something closer to $100 a share before I really buy into this stock. I'm going to highlight some of Alphabet's largest ownership investments next, but I want to get your input on this as well as we go through the company's 13F as you scroll through those stocks. Which do you think are going to be the biggest winners over the next 5 years?
So, let us know in the comments which stocks Alphabet is buying right now do you think are going to produce the highest returns? Alphabet made no change to some of its largest investments by ownership. First, it's 32 million shares of Planet Labs, Ticker PL, which gives it an 11% ownership stake in the company.
And as I pointed out the first time we looked at Alphabet's investment, this one seems like a strategic position for Google with that 10% stake in the largest owner of Earth imaging satellites. Planet Labs has more than 200 imaging satellites in orbit, more than any other company. It's a large addressable market for defense, intelligence, agriculture, and government, but also an essential partner for Google Maps.
Now, this is solid revenue growth around 15% to next year's $292 million in revenue with more than a,000 customers already and 90% of them in long-term contracts, but not the kind of 20% plus growth we see in other stocks on the list. So, there's clearly something more more important here to Google than just the return. Still though, it does have the potential as an investment trading at not too expensive five times sales with with that kind of growth and a strong balance sheet and more than any other company on the list, the potential for an eventual takeover offer from Alphabet.
Freshworks, Inc. ticker FRSH also continues to be a relatively large stake in terms of ownership with Alphabet holding on to its 16 million shares worth $233 million and 5. 3% of the company.
Freshworks offers employee and customer experience software for businesses driven by AI. So, the kind of AI assistance and chat and team platforms that is one of the first real use cases of artificial intelligence. Year-over-year growth has been good at 20% in the most recent quarter, but is forecasted to slow to 14% next year to $814 million in sales.
Shares have gotten slightly cheaper in the sell-off, though, and trade at about 5 1/2 times this year's expected sales. But if that growth does slow as expected, it's going to be a sign that the company is facing competitive pressures against peers, especially those big money players like Salesforce Inc. Another change from the last quarter was in a Revolution Medicine's ticker RVMD, which saw Alphabet sell out about 122,000 shares, though it still does hold 4 million shares worth 159 million, or about 2% of the company.
Revolution is a clinical stage oncology biotech targeting RA addicted cancers affecting hundreds of thousands of new patients every single year. This is a very early stage pipeline with only one indication in registration though and the rest in a really early clinical development which means significant revenues are likely years into the future and the company is expected to bring in just $346,000 this year but potentially $1. 4 million in sales next year but like the sale of GitLab shares here.
I don't think Alphabet's sell here is says anything about it support of the company. Alphabet has always been a big backer of healthcare and biotech research through its Google ventures arm and has that deep experience in the industry to know the good companies from the bat. If Alphabet saw that Revolution wasn't going to be successful, I think it would have cut the entire stake or much more than that 122,000 shares.
For example, Alphabet did sell completely out of its 540,000 share investment in Wrapped therapeutics during that quarter is also a relatively small holding worth just a million dollars. So, might not be a knock on confidence for Wrapped, but does show that Alphabet isn't afraid of cutting biotech stocks. Now, if we see in the next 13F filing another cut to Revolution Medicine, we'd have to re-evaluate that.
But right now, it could instead be a buying opportunity. Nation, I think the next stock Alphabet sold was a big mistake. And I'm using the recent dip to buy more.
But just because Nvidia is only investing 300 million in its five stocks doesn't mean it's not a huge signal to the market. Check out our prior video linked here in the corner. The five stocks Nvidia is buying, including two that it just sold.
So, make sure to catch that video next. Biggest change from my portfolio in Alphabet's updated 13F was the sell of all of its shares in Snowflake Inc. , ticker SN.
This was a fairly small stake at just 114,000 shares or about $17 million. After that giant pop in the shares on its earnings, Alphabet may have just decided to lock in some of those profits. I'm holding on to my 400 shares though, still up 26% for that long-term growth that is going to take this one higher.
Snowflake is in the data management and analysis theme. A major starting point in that AI revolution, being able to store and make sense of all that data. According to researcher 6 cents, Snowflake controls 21% market share of that data warehousing category, making it the market leader above even Amazon, Google, and SAP.
Sales are expected to continue higher at that 20% plus pace this year and next. Forecasted at four and a half billion dollars over the next 12 months. Like most in the AI theme, it's gotten cheaper in that recent sell-off, but still trades at about 11 times those forecasted sales.
So, I'm just holding my shares now, but would be a buyer at anything under 135 per share. Get your free report and see the stocks I'm buying for the next 30 years, my forever stocks, with the link in the description below, or click on the video to the right to see the stocks Nvidia is buying, including two it just sold. Don't forget to join the Let's Talk Money community by tapping that subscribe button and clicking the bell notification.
