New Favorites for 2019 from Last Year's Top Stock Pickers

Last January, MoneyShow.com asked the nation's leading financial newsletter advisors for their top stock picks. Mike Cintolo and Jim Woods topped the performance list; they have since seen their top picks rise 81% and 75%, respectively. Here, they update last year's ideas and reveal their new favorites for 2019. Jim Woods, Successful Investing The concept of affordable fitness with no judgments translated nicely into a massive win for health club operator Planet Fitness , my top pick in 2018. I'm an admitted fitness freak, and I'm always in the gym when I'm not behind my trading desk. Moreover, I currently serve as a consultant to a fitness industry startup. In Planet Fitness, I was able to combine my penchant for exercise with my love of picking great stocks. Planet Fitness owns and operates more than 1,500 fitness centers in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Canada. It also boasts nearly 11 million members, who rank the company as the highest in the fitness industry in terms of customer satisfaction, according to research firm J.D. Power. Over the past several quarters and several years, Planet Fitness has displayed EPS growth in the top 3% of all publicly traded companies. What continues to distinguish Planet Fitness the company in the commercial gym space is its low membership fees, clean and well-equipped facilities, and a general sense of value for the customer dollar. If the 2018 market proved anything it is that you need to own stocks with an earnings backbone. That's because like the cream, great companies with strong earnings and strong products pipelines tend to quickly rise to the top. One such company is medical device maker Abbott Laboratories , my favorite conservative investment idea for 2019. The diversified medical device maker, whose products include blood glucose monitoring kits, nutritional healthcare products, diagnostic products and equipment, has seen strong EPS growth that's put it in the top quartile of all publicly traded companies (growth over the past two quarters and past several years). That growth has been recognized by the fast money in 2018, as Abbott's 2018 gain of around 27% puts it in the top 6% of price performers over the past year (it also pays a 1.8% dividend yield for even more upside). One personal note here, I am about to get some firsthand knowledge of one very interesting new Abbot product called DRG therapy. This surgically implanted electronic stimulation device is used for chronic pain management (in my case injuries from years of martial arts, bodybuilding and military training). The device delivers pain relief to a reported 74.2% of patients who suffer from complex regional pain syndrome, or CRPS. Hopefully, I will be in that near three-quarters of patients with those positive results. For Wall Street, the upside in Abbott has allowed it to trade well above its 200-day moving average in 2018. And despite the volatility we witnessed in most stocks during the fourth quarter of 2018, the shares ended the year back above their short-term, 50-day moving average at a time when most stocks were tanking. I suspect this healthcare standout is just getting started. We hold a position in the stock in the model portfolio of our Fast Money Alert advisory service. Match Group , the online dating site company and our top aggressive idea for 2019, has been one of the best stocks to own over the past couple of years, and that's because its earnings power has been so strong. The company operates high-profile dating sites such as its namesake Match, Tinder, Plenty Of Fish, Meetic, Ok Cupid, Pairs, Twoo, and OurTime. I don't know about you, but in my age category (late-40s to early 50s) there's a huge growing population of couples recently divorced. In fact, most of my friends are going on dates for the first time in years, and many of them have found dating partners via Match.com. The result has been earnings per share growth (both current and over the past several years) that's in the top 3% of all publicly traded companies. On the share price front, Match Group's approximate 30% gain in 2018 put it in the top 10% of all publicly traded companies. And because stocks that show positive momentum on strong earnings tend to continue showing positive momentum, I think the stock will continue riding higher in 2019. Of course, Match was volatile in 2018. Yet, Match's surge off of the November lows shows a stock poised to continue trending higher in 2019. After the crazy year that was 2018, what we all could use is a date with a hot stock. That's why I will be logging on to Match Group shares in 2019. For disclosure, we are long Match Group in the model portfolio of our Bullseye Stock Trader advisory service. Mike Cintolo, Cabot Growth Investor Despite getting caught up in the market's decline since October, Five Below put on a good show this past year. But now the question is: What comes next? I still see great potential going forward; we're still holding a position in Cabot Growth Investor's model portfolio. And the reason is that the big-picture story is still in place -- Five Below should continue to crank out consistent 20%-ish earnings growth for many years as it rapidly expands its store base (thanks to best-in-class new store economics -- payback of a new opening occurs in less than one year) and customers keep coming back (more than 10 straight years of same-store sales gains). Yes, there are some tariff worries, but management has made it clear that it's comfortable with the 10% Chinese tariffs, and is optimistic that even if the trade war intensifies, it can find ways to mostly offset that. Analysts still see earnings up 19% for 2019, and those figures are usually conservative. As for the stock itself, it originally began its advance in late 2017, so we don't see this as a late-stage, obvious situation. Obviously the market needs to be in gear for a big advance, but we think Five Below has a dependable, multi-year growth story that should continue to attract big investors. Twilio is my new top pick for 2019. If a company big or small wants to automate and simplify communications to customers, clients or coworkers, Twilio and its well-rounded, customizable and relatively easy-to-use communications platform is fast becoming the go-to choice. Coca-Cola Enterprises uses Twilio to rapidly dispatch service technicians, Airbnb uses it to automatically text rental hosts information of potential guests, including dates and the price of a stay, and the Red Cross of Chicago automatically sends texts to volunteers in an area with pertinent info about a disaster. Meanwhile, Trulia uses Twilio to power its click-to-call app so potential buyers can hook up with an agent right quick; EMC uses the platform to quickly send texts to employees when an IT service goes down. And Twilio's newer Flex offering (cloud-based, flexible call center application) has already signed up some big customers such as Lyft, and its new pay app allows developers to process payments over the phone without reading a card number to a rep. Just about any business can use Twilio's communications platform for text, voice, video, chats and messaging apps. And thanks to the company's proposed acquisition of SendGrid (likely to be completed in early 2019), the platform will now include the email capabilities. The firm exited September with 61,153 active customers (up 32% from a year ago), but it's getting more big clients (it inked Fortune 500 financial services and medical testing outfits in Q3), helping revenue per customer rise 27%. All told, revenue growth is accelerating in a big way and earnings have leapt into the black. Fundamentally, we see Twilio as something of an emerging blue chip -- a name that institutional investors will build positions in for many quarters to come. And, on that note, we're encouraged that the stock was one of the most resilient during the market's fourth-quarter maelstrom.

New Favorites for 2019 from Last Year's Top Stock Pickers

Mike Cintolo and Jim Woods saw their top picks for 2018 rise 81% and 75%, respectively.

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