Although Amazon’s stock has underperformed this year, Deutsche Bank claims that worries about cloud market-share losses are exaggerated.
Every quarter brings with it a fresh round of highly confident stock recommendations from Deutsche Bank analysts.
On Wednesday, the bank released its “fresh money” list of the best investment ideas for the fourth quarter, arguing for 38 equities, 22 of which are new this time around. Deutsche Bank researchers identified nine highly attractive possibilities, including four new ones, in the technology, media, and telecoms industries.
Among them is Palo Alto Networks Inc. (PANW), which has underperformed the S&P 500 SPX this year but has the potential to do better in the future, according to analyst Brad Zelnick, because of the company’s strong cybersecurity position, capacity to leverage artificial intelligence, and potential to profit from recently announced acquisitions.
Deutsche Bank’s recent survey and the company’s most recent earnings “suggest that the underlying business is healthier than many investors expected following the announced acquisition of CyberArk.” The second half of fiscal 2026 is when that $25 billion agreement is anticipated to finalize, having been disclosed in July.
This quarter, analysts added Visa Inc. (V) to their list of laggards. “The market has seemingly overreacted to transient concerns around slowing cross-border growth and stablecoins, despite [Visa’s] ability to meet and exceed earnings estimates,” Nate Svensson, an analyst, wrote.
Although the stock has risen 10% so far this year, compared to the S&P 500’s 14% gain, Svensson believes the company can still gain from rising personal consumer spending and new payment streams, such as those for business-to-business transactions that Visa wasn’t previously able to handle.
Lam Research Corp., on the other hand, has benefited greatly from this year thus far, as evidenced by the roughly twofold increase in its stock price since 2025. However, Deutsche Bank’s Melissa Weathers added Lam to the “fresh money” list, pointing to the possibility of more opportunities as demand for memory chips rises.
Trends in dynamic random-access memory had been “relatively solid,” according to chip-equipment players like Lam, but trends in NAND, the other segment of the memory market, had been less optimistic.
However, in more recent times, “there have been several well-publicized developments in memory markets that we think bode well for an inflection in total memory spending,” according to Weathers, who also mentioned “a broader reversal of inventory/utilization headwinds,” a tight DRAM market, and rising demand for end devices.
After a flat and dismal run for its stock so far this year, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is still on the list. The company’s cloud division hasn’t expanded as fast as its competitors’, which has contributed to concerns that Amazon Web Services is losing market share and isn’t as prepared for the AI economy as its rivals. Lee Horowitz, an analyst, is not worried.
“With generative AI accelerating the shift towards a digital economy unlocking infrastructure spend that we expect to measure in the trillions of dollars over time, and AWS still in pole position in terms of cloud scale to take advantage of this shift, current market-share concerns are likely to prove transitory,” he stated.
Don’t pass on the historic bargain on Amazon’s stock. Is it the decade’s best deal?
The stock of Meta Platforms Inc. (META), which has increased 23% so far this year, has fared better than Amazon’s. In the upcoming year, however, Ben Black of Deutsche Bank praised its “potential to materially outperform the broader market, and its internet peers,” citing its control of the “most durable advertising platform” in the sector as well as new prospects arising from foundation models.
The whole list of high-conviction picks is available here. According to Deutsche Bank, since its launch in July 2017, the list has returned 241%, while the S&P 500 has gained 213%.
