January 11, 2025
There is no generally accepted definition of " cheap stocks ." You can use that term for those with low share prices, for investments that seem to be worth more than Wall Street's asking price, and for small-cap companies that might look like affordable buyouts to a larger business.
You can even apply it to stocks that have fallen far below an earlier pricing peak, or to shares with exorbitantly rich dividend yields.
But some definitions are more useful than others. Today, I'm looking at a couple of tech stocks with the investor-friendly quality of trading at modest valuation ratios despite fantastic long-term prospects.
This is my favorite definition of cheapness on Wall Street, because finding these stocks can make you a lot of money over time. You know what they (almost) say: Buy low, hold on for many years, sell high . Getting in at a deep-discount stock price is a great way to start that money-making process.
So let me show you why I think Roku (NASDAQ: ROKU) and Fiverr International (NYSE: FVRR) fit that description in January 2025.
You might recognize these two names as stars of the coronavirus pandemic's era of lockdowns and remote work.
Stuck at home with limited access to other entertainment options, millions of people started watching movies and TV shows through streaming media services, often via Roku-powered devices.
Others (and in many cases, the same people) suddenly had time on their hands to pursue online freelancing. Fiverr was happy to help with connecting these idle experts in various fields to companies and other people who needed their services.
So Fiverr and Roku soared in 2020 and 2021 but crashed hard when their customers went back to office work. Keep in mind that I'm talking about their stocks here, not their sales. The businesses continued to thrive long after investors started to write them off as temporary COVID-19 winners:
It's true that Fiverr and Roku experienced slower sales growth in 2022 and a brief period of stalled success in 2023. But that's hardly a unique story, as consumers around the world changed their spending habits in response to soaring inflation.
Business powerhouses like Apple and Microsoft were undermined by the same personal-budget effects, and with worse results. Roku and Fiverr have doubled their annual sales since 2020, while Microsoft's top-line growth stopped at 66% and Apple's was 33%. Yet, the market-darling tech giants nearly doubled their stock prices while my freelancing and media-streaming heroes crashed.
And I'm not worried about Roku's or Fiverr's weak earnings, which were often printed in red ink in recent years. The companies are still generating healthy free cash flows, which makes me think of their low or negative earnings as an effective tax-reduction strategy.
In early 2025, Roku's stock is changing hands at 3.1 times sales. The company is building on its North American market dominance with the beginnings of an international growth strategy, and its ad-based sales should soon soar again. Ad buyers will probably flock to its cost-effective ad spots as the aftereffects of the inflation panic are fading out.
Fiverr's price-to-sales ratio sits just below Roku's, and the stock is worth just 12 times estimated earnings in 2025. You can also look at its affordable price-to-free-cash-flow ratio, which stops at 14.5. Based on these metrics, Fiverr's stock could double in price and still look cheap next to Microsoft or Apple. With expanded operations like a recently launched hub for nonprofit services, the company is monetizing its freelancing-gig platform in new ways.
There you have it. The future looks bright for these forgotten tech stocks. Fiverr and Roku deserve more market respect than they're getting, and I highly recommend buying while they're cheap.
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