2019 has been a great year for the Canadian markets. Up 18.7% year-to-date, the TSX is nearing all-time highs. Even if you held just TSX index funds this year, you’d have done quite well.
And yet with certain individual stocks, you could have done much better. As you’re about to see, there have been a handful of superstar stocks this year that have dramatically outperformed the TSX.
Delivering superior returns and–in some cases–high dividend income, these stocks have made investors extraordinarily happy in the year we’re about to say goodbye to.
The following are three such superstar stocks that out-performed in 2019.
Shopify
Shopify Inc (TSX:SHOP)(NYSE:SHOP) has been one of the best-performing TSX stocks since its 2015 IPO. Up well over 1000% since that time, it has absolutely crushed the market.
What has driven this stock’s meteoric rise?
A combination of high revenue growth, intermittent profitability, and solid name recognition.
In its most recent quarter, Shopify grew its revenue by 45% year over year, driven by solid gains in merchant solutions. It’s not quite the stunning growth the company used to post, but it’s still quite fast.
Shopify could also be considered profitable by some metrics. Although it’s never posted a GAAP net profit, it has posted positive adjusted earnings in the past. The most recent quarter wasn’t one of them, but this company is much closer to profitability than other trendy tech stocks like Uber.
Finally, this stock simply has a very popular name that garners a lot of attention in the financial press, potentially contributing to its gains.
Lightspeed POS
Lightspeed POS Inc (TSX:LSPD) is another recent IPO that has done quite well since it went public.
Since its closing price of $18.9, it has shot up an incredible 78%. Its IPO was in March, meaning that impressive gain was produced in less than a year.
Lightspeed, like Shopify, is involved in payment processing. Unlike Shopify, however, LSPD has a big focus on brick and mortar sales, as opposed to e-commerce.
This could give Shopify an edge as an investment. E-commerce is taking a lot of customers from retail stores, and as a result is growing much faster.
However, Lightspeed’s growth in its most recent quarter actually accelerated, whereas Shopify’s growth has been slowing. It’s also worth mentioning that Lightspeed does provide an e-commerce platform in addition to its core brick and mortar point of sale system, so it’s not so black and white.
AltaGas
AltaGas Ltd (TSX:ALA) is a diversified energy company with investments in midstream, utilities and power. The company’s midstream business includes processing, storage and transportation.
Its utility business supplies natural gas to customers in D.C., Virginia, Maryland, Michigan and Alaska. Finally, its power business supplies electricity to customers in both the U.S. and Canada. Energy stocks have been performing fairly poorly over the past five years after oil collapsed in 2015.
AltaGas, however, has a diversified business that has been growing. With a focus on midstream and utilities, as well as LNG, it’s not as vulnerable to crude oil price swings as other energy companies are. As a result, it’s fared better than most other energy stocks.
This year, ALA has risen 42%. In addition to the market-beating gains it has delivered, the stock pays a dividend that yields 4.84% at current prices.
