So far, 2026 hasn’t quite the boom year for growth equities that many had hoped for.
Stocks have broadly been weighed down by concerns about economic growth, new tariff policy, and even another (briefer) government shutdown … and that was before America’s war with Iran threw even more uncertainty into the picture. And the growth haven of tech in particular has struggled thanks to concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) will cut deeply into the software and other industries.
Wall Street’s pros remain unflinchingly optimistic about some names, however, believing the recent selloff is less omen and more opportunity. Indeed, a little froth off the top has made these growth stocks even more attractive from a valuation standpoint, they say.
Let’s explore some of the Wall Street analyst community’s top growth stocks right now. These are companies that “the pros” believe will rapidly grow their top and bottom lines in the years to come—and whose stocks they expect will be propelled higher as a result.
Disclaimer: This article does not constitute individualized investment advice. Individual securities, funds, and/or other investments appear for your consideration and not as personalized investment recommendations. Act at your own discretion.
What Is a Growth Stock?
A growth stock is generally viewed as a company that is improving sales and profits with each passing year—typically at a faster clip than the industry average. This should, in theory, result in faster stock price appreciation as other shareholders get wise to this success and decide to buy in themselves.
Growth stocks tend to be viewed in opposition to value stocks, which might not grow as fast but have substantial underlying operations that the market is underappreciating (for now).
So, what metrics do we want to look at?
Growth stocks tend to boast rapid sales. Income matters, too—though it’s more important among more established companies, as smaller growth stocks often burn all their cash on expansion. Expectations matter, too, because if rapid growth still falls short of Street estimates, these supposedly highflying companies might still see their stocks slump.
Similarly, we have to consider the competition. For instance, if an AI company is growing at a 40% rate, that might sound great, but if similar companies are growing at a 50%-plus clip, that AI company could be viewed as a laggard.
In other words: Not all growth stocks are good investments, even if they’re growing … heck, even if they’re growing quickly! That means we have to look past the surface to really find the best growth stocks to buy.
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The Best Growth Stocks to Buy Now
The top growth stocks right now are companies expanding faster than the broader market, as well as their peers. That often involves riding a long-term trend that will result in a durable tailwind for years to come.
Nothing is certain on Wall Street, of course, and growth stocks that showed strong revenue trends or stock price appreciation over the past year might still stumble if things change in the months to come. That said, investors who pay attention to growth stock data can often identify companies moving into favor—and share in their success.
Today, I’ll look at some of the best growth stocks for 2026 based on recent performance, financial metrics, and equity analysts’ ratings and growth projections. I’ll include both long-term earnings-growth estimates and consensus analyst ratings, courtesy of S&P Global Market Intelligence. The consensus rating is the average of all known analyst ratings of the stock, boiled down to a numerical system where …
- 1-1.5 = Strong Buy
- 1.5-2.5 = Buy
- 2.5-3.5 = Hold
- 3.5-4.5 = Sell
- 4.5-5 = Strong Sell
In short, the lower the number, the better the overall consensus view on the stock.
All stocks here are rated at least 2.0 or below, meaning at worst they’re solidly in the Buy camp, though most of the picks are considered Strong Buys as we enter 2026.
Best Growth Stock #7: Eli Lilly
- Sector: Health care
- Market cap: $807.5 billion
- Long-term earnings growth estimate: 24%
- Consensus analyst rating: 1.71 (Buy)
Wall Street analysts stuck by Big Pharma mainstay Eli Lilly (LLY) through what was shaping up to be a lousy 2025 thanks in large part to a worrying result for one of its most promising drugs. But the bulls eventually won out, with LLY delivering a market-stomping 40% total return (price plus dividends) across the full year.
Now, the pros are yet again predicting good things amid a slump in shares.
Lilly has a stable of blockbuster products, including breast cancer drug Verzenio and type 2 diabetes treatment Trulicity. But most of LLY’s growth hopes rest on the shoulders of its diabetes and weight-loss products, including two products (Mounjaro and Zepbound) that generated a combined $36.5 billion in revenues in 2025—almost double what they made in 2024.
In early August, LLY shares took a double-digit hit after a late-stage trial for its weight-loss pill (orforglipron) delivered a less-than-expected average weight loss and trailed the efficacy of a drug from rival Novo Nordisk (NVO). But a few weeks later, data from another orforglipron trial met expectations—an important event setting up what Lilly now believes will be a second-quarter launch.
Yet LLY is down 15% year-to-date as I write this, with its biggest gap down coming in mid-March after a strong earnings print and a downgrade to Reduce (equivalent of Sell) from HSBC, which moderated its expectations for obesity-drug total addressable market (TAM).
HSBC is the company’s lone Sell call, however. The rest of the Street is overwhelmingly bullish, at 24 Buys and six Holds. UBS’s Michael Yee (Buy), for one, thinks the pullback in sentiment is perfectly healthy for now.
“Expectations have been coming down, which is a positive,” he says. “We still expect a strong launch and upside to consensus and guidance this year. We like the stock here on the pullback. … We do think Orfo will put up a good script launch in Q2 and Q3 that will surpass the launch of injectable Tirzepatide back in 2024.”
The analyst community’s expectations are for 24% average annual earnings growth over the next five years. Lilly has also delivered plenty of dividend growth, including a 15% boost to the distribution (to $1.73 per share) announced in late 2025.
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Best Growth Stock #6: Axon Enterprise
- Sector: Industrials
- Market cap: $36.6 billion
- Long-term earnings growth estimate: 39%
- Consensus analyst rating: 1.60 (Buy)
Axon Enterprise (AXON) is a public safety technology provider that’s best known for the Taser brand of electroshock weapons. But it’s much more than Taser—its product lines also include body cameras, in-car cameras, drones and counter-drone technologies, accessories, even VR training hardware. It also offers a plethora of services, such as digital evidence management, records management, operations software, and more.
For years, Axon has been a rampant operational growth story with a stock price to match, but shares found a new gear after the 2024 elections in anticipation of a ramp-up in spending. However, shares hit a wall starting in summer 2025, and those losses began to accelerate alongside a number of software-as-a-service names amid fears that artificial intelligence (AI) was coming to eat everyone’s lunch.
But the company’s most recent earnings suggest that in some cases, including Axon’s, that AI concerns might be overdone.
“We were impressed by the strong performance Axon delivered this quarter, particularly its acceleration in quarterly bookings growth to 53%, as well as the 2028 targets,” say William Blair analysts, who rate the stock at Outperform (equivalent of Buy). “In our view, this should assuage concerns that the company’s business faces near-term AI headwinds as well as deceleration risk. Instead, we believe the quarter results are a clear indication that public safety customers are likely to adopt AI through companies such as Axon that are building AI-powered capabilities into their workflows.”
They’re not alone. While AXON is in the midst of a near-halving of its shares, it enjoys 18 Buy calls versus two Holds and nary a Sell. Moreover, the pros see the company delivering nearly 40% annual profit growth, on average, across the next five years.
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Best Growth Stock #5: Micron
- Sector: Technology
- Market cap: $399.5 billion
- Long-term earnings growth estimate: 91%
- Consensus analyst rating: 1.58 (Buy)
Micron Technology (MU) specializes in memory and storage products, such as dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), NAND flash memory, and solid-state drives (SSDs). It serves a wide variety of markets, including PCs, graphics, networking, automotive, industrial, and consumer. Perhaps its most important right now is data centers, where AI-driven demand has helped to reinvigorate prices for NAND and DRAM broadly.
“In the age of AI, no company other than Nvidia has blown away consensus expectations as measurably as Micron did with 2Q26 results and 3Q26 guidance,” says Argus analyst Jim Kelleher (Buy). “Growth is being driven by surging prices and AI demand for high bandwidth memory (HBM), along with soaring DRAM volumes, favorable mix, and improved NAND demand.”
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That’s not the only thing helping to prop up Micron’s bull thesis. For instance, in January, Micron announced that it would buy a semiconductor wafer fabrication site from Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing for $1.8 billion.
“The acquisition of PSMC fab/site in Taiwan provides a structural outlet for more sustained supply growth from [roughly] 18 months onward,” says Stifel analyst Brian Chin (Buy). “It makes strategic sense for Micron to invest further in Taiwan, as it would be increasingly difficult for Micron to keep pace with peers in [2027] reliant mostly on its initial Boise fab.”
MU lost a few Buy calls in the second half of 2025 amid a run-up in shares, but the bull camp has been filling back up. Currently, Micron stock enjoys 36 Buy calls versus just six Holds and one Sell. Meanwhile, their expectations for the bottom line are sky-high, with the consensus looking for more than 90% annual earnings expansion over the next five years.
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Best Growth Stock #4: Insulet
- Sector: Health care
- Market cap: $15.4 billion
- Long-term earnings growth estimate: 27%
- Consensus analyst rating: 1.42 (Strong Buy)
Insulet (PODD) is a medical device company that’s responsible for the Omnipod line of insulin pump products.
Its most recent version of the device is the Omnipod 5—a wearable automated insulin delivery (AID) system that includes a fully integrated smartphone app. It’s also compatible with DexCom’s (DXCM) G7 and G6 continuous glucose monitor (CGM) systems, as well as the FreeStyle Libre 2 Plus Sensors. Insulet also produces the Omnipod DASH, which isn’t automated, but instead delivers insulin based on the user’s programmed basal rates and requires manual bolusing for meals and corrections.
Insulet is one of a large number of health care companies vying to treat the world’s hundreds of millions of diabetics, but Wall Street is overwhelmingly optimistic about its ability to differentiate. At the moment, 22 analysts call the stock a Buy, versus just one Hold and one Sell—a bull camp that remains firm despite a nearly 40% slump in PODD shares.
“Ultimately, the company’s expanded salesforce, increased prescriber base, robust sampling efforts, geographical expansion, and streamlined market access delivered another quarter of record patient adds,” William Blair analysts, who rate the stock at Outperform, wrote after the company’s most recent earnings report. “We expect these tailwinds to continue through 2026-plus, which can compound with new products launches expected in 2027 and 2028 for sustained 20%-plus top-line growth.
“There remains noise around potential competitive entrants in the next one to two years, but we continue to believe Insulet’s scale and commercial execution will be difficult to match for at least the near future, leaving it well-positioned as the primary beneficiary of underpenetrated global automated insulin delivery (AID) markets.”
PODD remains mired in a slump, but analyst price targets now imply 60% upside for the stock within the next 12 months. Meanwhile, Wall Street is still looking for a robust bottom-line expansion of 27% annually over the next few years.
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Best Growth Stock #3: Smurfit Westrock
- Sector: Consumer discretionary
- Market cap: $21.0 billion
- Long-term earnings growth estimate: 31%
- Consensus analyst rating: 1.31 (Strong Buy)
Smurfit Westrock (SW)—the product of a 2024 merger of Ireland’s Smurfit Kappa and America’s Westrock—is a global manufacturer of consumer packaging, corrugated packaging, and a variety of paper products. And by virtue of that merger, the combined entity is now one of the largest packaging providers in the world, with operations in 40 countries.
Consider Smurfit Westrock an interesting beneficiary of technological trends—specifically, the continued rise of e-commerce. As people increasingly move away from buying in brick-and-mortar stores and toward online shopping … well, those products have to get shipped in something, and that’s precisely where Smurfit comes in.
“[We estimate] that the industry will remain strong, and we see modest expansion at a compound annual growth rate of 3%-4% through 2028,” writes Argus Research analyst Alexandra Yates, who rates SW shares at Buy. “We favor companies with pulp, paperboard packaging, and corrugated product lines, and expect this segment to show continued long-term growth through 2030.”
Of course, Smurfit is expected to grow at a much healthier clip, with analyst expectations for long-term annual earnings growth of more than 30%.
Among nearer-term tailwinds are a price hike on kraft paper. “This morning, [price reporting provider] RISI noted SW is out to its customers with a $50/ton price increase for all of its kraft paper grades in the U.S., effective April 15,” Jefferies analyst Philip Ng (Buy) wrote in mid-March. “If the $50/ton increase is fully implemented, it could boost SW’s EBITDA by ~$40 million or ~0.8% of our 2026E EBITDA estimate. The last time unbleached kraft packaging paper prices increased in North America was a year ago.”
SW has picked up quite a few covering analysts of late, and they’re unanimously bullish, with all 16 calling the stock a Buy.
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Best Growth Stock #2: Nvidia
- Sector: Technology
- Market cap: $4.2 trillion
- Long-term earnings growth estimate: 38%
- Consensus analyst rating: 1.28 (Strong Buy)
Nvidia (NVDA) isn’t just the world’s largest tech stock by market capitalization, but the largest stock period, thanks to its dominance in semiconductors that are used in cutting-edge technologies.
No. 1 with a bullet is the artificial intelligence market, and at least for now, Nvidia is king of that market. But applications for this firm’s hardware also include self-driving cars, cryptocurrency mining, and other in-demand and growth-oriented areas of the 21st century economy.
“For every $1 spent on an NVDA chip, we estimate an $8 to $10 multiplier rippling across the ecosystem,” says a team of Wedbush analysts led by Dan Ives (Outperform). “Hyperscalers, software, data center buildouts, cybersecurity, and power/energy are set to benefit from the $3 to $4 trillion of AI capex set to take place over the next three years as Nvidia’s chips remain at the epicenter of this 4th Industrial Revolution.”
Nvidia has unsurprisingly been a font of growth, and that’s not expected to end anytime soon. Analysts see revenues improving by 50% annually on average over the next two years, and long-term earnings growth at a clip of 38%.
“We view NVDA as *the* AI company: a sustainable leader in massive parallel and heterogeneous compute chips, software, and recently services, to enable AI and related applications,” says Truist’s William Stein (Buy). “We see NVDA’s leadership as driven less by the raw performance of its chips, and more by its culture of innovation, ecosystem of incumbency, and massive investment in software, AI models, and services, that we believe makes its chips a default choice for most engineers building AI systems.
“We expect NVDA’s superior positioning in gaming, server acceleration/AI and, eventually, autonomous driving, will lead to ongoing structural fundamental growth and stock outperformance.”
NVDA has the largest bull camp, by total analysts, in our list of 2026’s best growth stocks: a whopping 57 Buys. That compares to just two Holds and a lonely Sell.
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Best Growth Stock #1: Take-Two Interactive Software
- Sector: Communication services
- Market cap: $36.2 billion
- Long-term earnings growth estimate: 36%
- Consensus analyst rating: 1.25 (Strong Buy)
Take-Two Interactive Software (TTWO), tops on our list of tech stocks to buy right now, is a juggernaut in the video game space, responsible for developing, publishing, and marketing a variety of titles, often under subsidiary labels including Rockstar Games and 2K. Among its various games are the WWE, PGA, and NBA 2K series, Civilization, Red Dead Redemption, a host of mobile games (including Words With Friends and FarmVille), and most notably, the Grand Theft Auto series.
Anyone who follows video games even casually will have a laugh over a Jefferies analyst report titled “Well It’s Groundhog Day… Again.”
“Strong results from NBA 2K and mobile drove an even larger beat than expected, but the headline from F2Q results is undoubtedly the further delay of GTA VI to Nov. 19, 2026,” says analyst James Heaney, who rates the stock at Buy.
GTA VI is a long-awaited title that’s all but certain to be a blockbuster, but it also has become something of a running joke. Its launch will now come roughly 13 years after the release of its predecessor, GTA V. That’s longer than the gap between the launch of Grand Theft Auto’s third and fifth editions! GTA V originally launched on the PlayStation 3; it has since been relaunched on PS4 and PS5 to give GTA fans something, anything to do in the interim.
Regardless, Wall Street largely expects GTA VI to be a success, and that’s reflected in extremely bullish ratings: 26 Buys, one Hold, and one Sell as of this writing. That’s not just despite a drop in TTWO shares amid widespread AI concerns, but for some, because of it.
“TTWO now offers a particularly attractive buying opportunity after the recent drawdown on concerns that Google’s ‘Genie 3’ model undermines AAA publishers,” say BofA Global Research analysts Omar Dessouky and Arthur Chu (Buy). “We view the concerns as misplaced: (1) Management clarified that Genie ‘is not a game engine’ and today looks closer to a procedurally generated interactive video tool than a replacement for mission design, physics, networking or live-ops; it cannot supplant end‑to‑end game production. (2) About half of TTWO’s earnings are gated by proprietary IP and licenses (e.g., NBA/NBPA, player likeness rights), and the company’s hallmark open‑world titles deliver ~100 hours of authored gameplay and stable multiplayer environments at scale.”
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Growth Stocks: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Should I buy growth stocks or a growth exchange-traded fund?
Growth-oriented investing strategies are always in-demand, so there are a host of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) out there that own growth stocks. The largest, the Vanguard Growth ETF (VUG), commands more than $200 billion in assets as proof of the popularity of this approach.
ETFs allow for easy diversification as you invest tactically in growth stocks. But keep in mind that by spreading your money around and reducing your risk, you also limit your upside. Many growth investors are enamored with the idea of a stock that doubles in short order—and that’s almost impossible with an ETF that holds hundreds of different components.
In short: Whether you buy growth stocks or an ETF depends on your personal risk tolerance.
What kind of brokers handle growth stocks?
The good news is, virtually any traditional broker is going to allow you to buy growth stocks. As long as equities are on the table—and that’s the case with virtually all online brokers—you’ll be able to buy any style of stock: growth, value, dividend, you name it.
You can check out our favorite online brokers for a full list of options, but here are some options worth considering as well:
